Guest Post

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What Do We Really Mean When We Say “Show, Don’t Tell”?

Limit telling to between-scene summaries. In-scene, showing is what pulls readers into your story through clear actions and emotions.
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How Naming a Character Is Like Naming a Child

Choosing a name, either for a real human or a fictional one, involves a blend of logic and intuition and can feel deeply consequential.
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When Writing Gets Hard: 3 Hidden Causes of Writer’s Block

When your writing hits a wall the solution is often to stop for a moment, take stock, and look deeper into what it is you’re trying to write.
Image: a vintage, clothbound volume of Jane Austen's work in a bookshop in Oxford, UK.

Writing Lessons from Jane Austen: Story Questions and Northanger Abbey

As an early architect of the novel form, Austen’s use of a unifying thematic question contributed to the development of long-form narratives.
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Crafting Memoir with a Message: Blending Story with Self-Help

When executed well, a memoir with a message can touch lives through the power of personal narrative combined with practical wisdom.
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Choosing Story Settings Based on Genre

Whatever settings you choose, they need to align with your theme, support the plot, and help define your characters.
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The Compounding Value of Small Group Writing Retreats and Intensives

A writing retreat attendee shares some of the unique benefits that intensive study offers versus conferences and online classes.
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How to Stop Gaslighting Your Memoir Writing Process

If someone has repeatedly hurt you, trying to make them more redeemable on the page might hit your gaslight button. But it doesn’t have to.
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Is Your Story “Big Enough” to Write About?

We all have limiting beliefs that essentially all say the same thing: you are not good enough so stop writing. They are not true.
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Defining Negative Space in Story

When you manipulate spaces in between with intention, your readers will stay intrigued by emotion, mystery, and ambiguity.
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The Double-Edged Sword of List Building Promotions

Third-party promoters who offer to pad your email subscriber list for a fee might be attracting the wrong type of readers.
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How to Write Compelling Inner Conflict

When we show our character’s cognitive dissonance—wrestling with conflicting beliefs—readers can’t help but relate and empathize.
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5 Reasons You Should Consider Writing Your Memoir in Present Tense

Present tense is tough to execute and doesn’t suit every writer or every memoir, but here are a few reasons to give it a try.
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3 Book Marketing Misconceptions and What to Do Instead

Shifting your understanding and approach to book marketing can transform it from a dreaded chore to a rewarding part of our journey.
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Embrace Complication to Develop a Can’t-Put-It-Down Narrative

Even if your plot is moving along nicely, a well-placed complication can jolt the action forward or sideways, or surprise your reader a little.
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Your Small Press Submission Checklist

If you’ve decided to seek a press that accepts unagented work, here’s a checklist to help you make a submission list you can feel confident in.
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Avoid, Persevere, Endure, Fight: 4 Goals for Unforgettable Opening Scenes

A strong story opening might introduce your character's normal world, while also making clear the untenable situation they must change.
Image: at the Sculpture by the Lakes park in Dorchester UK, a rusted metal artwork has the word "Listen" cut out so that the deep blue sky shows through.

A Writer’s Secret Weapon: Add a Listening Pass to Your Editing Arsenal

Using a phone’s text-to-speech feature to read your story aloud while doing chores is a great way to catch errors that you might otherwise miss.
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Turn Fact Into Fiction—Without Hurting Someone or Getting Sued

Imagine a friend reveals a secret past so compelling that no novelist could resist turning it into fiction. Here’s how one author went about it.
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Boundaries Are About More Than Simply Carving Out the Time to Write

Boundaries within ourselves—our limits, standards, knowing which interactions are worthwhile—are as important as those we set with others.
Black and white photo of a rainy parking lot, with a single white car in the background. In the foreground is a discarded photo of that same car at some time in the past, when it was decorated with a sign reading 'JUST MARRIED.'

Why Your Flashbacks Aren’t Working

Like a genie in a bottle, flashbacks can be wonderful and terrible things. If not carefully controlled, flashbacks can get disastrously out of hand.
Photo of David Temple with the following quote from the interview: "The biggest thriller writers, like me, are just as nervous about succeeding, and just as scared of failing, all the while feeling neurotic that someone will find them to be a phony."

How to Gain Traction in Your Career: Q&A with The Thriller Zone’s David Temple

Podcast host, author, and actor David Temple discusses his shift from being in radio to writing novels, landing all-star interviews, and more.
Two screenshots comparing how Word's Navigation Pane would appear with different uses of Heading tags for a fiction manuscript. On the left is a version showing a non-hierarchical text list of the book's scenes, such as "Sara loses job", "Joe day 1 at vet clinic", "Backstory - choice of town" and "Backstory - choice of career". On the right is a version of the Navigation Pane with the same list of scenes but with heading tags applied so that some scenes are clearly nested within others. In this example, "Backstory - choice of career" is now nested within the "Joe day 1 at vet clinic" scene, and "Backstory - choice of town" is now nested within the "Sara loses job" scene.

How to Teach Word a Scrivener Trick

MS Word is great for collaboration using Track Changes, but can it offer drag & drop organization like Scrivener? Yes, with a little know-how.
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How Do You Know What Backstory to Include?

Backstory risks feeling clumsy or intrusive if it’s not directly relevant to the main, “real-time” story, and can stall forward momentum.
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Using Beat Sheets to Slant Your Memoir’s Scenes

Identifying your story’s turning point or “beats”, and the function each one serves, can help shape your material into a more focused narrative.