Fiction Craft

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How Fear Affects Your Character in Real Time

Fear can limit our ability to apply reason and logic, leading to flawed choices and behavior—bad in real life, but story gold in fiction.
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Nailing Omniscient POV: 5 Guidelines to Captivate (Not Confuse) Readers

Omniscient POV might be resurging, thanks to some recent bestsellers. To use it well, remember three C’s: clarity, consistency, and control.
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Creating Microtension in Your Story Through Repetition

A repeated word, phrase, motif, symbol, or image can create tension for your readers in small, barely noticeable increments.
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Giving Your Characters Serious Challenges May Give Them Delightful Strengths

Most characters have a challenge to overcome, but what about more serious physical or psychological issues that can’t be “cured” or ignored?
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Build the Bridge: 3 Kinds of Transitions

When a scene shifts to a new setting, time, or POV without clearly bridging that gap, we risk losing readers’ trust and goodwill.
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Base Your Story Structure on Principles, Not Systems

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to structure a story, so understanding the core principles will help you decide what’s right for yours.
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Embrace Quirky: 5 Benefits of Using Animal Point-of-View Characters

By observing our own species through the eyes of another, something new just might be revealed to us.
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Writing Beyond Ourselves

Writing outside our lived experience isn’t just about getting facts right—it’s also about learning who we are when we truly listen to others.
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How NOT to Confuse Your Readers

A successful story unfurls in a way that both keeps readers grounded and keeps them guessing—so withhold information, but not context.
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What Improv Comedy Taught Me About Writing Novels

Improv is about being in the moment, and showed one author how to let go, listen better, take risks, and move on when something doesn’t work.
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The Art of Connective Tissue: What Raymond Carver Teaches Us About Building Character and Showing

Small bits of action—descending the stairs, cleaning off the car—might not be insignificant if they tell something about a character’s world.
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When Women Ignore Their Instincts (and Why I Wrote a Novel About It)

One writer explores how women will rationalize away feelings of unease for the sake of pleasing others, and how we express that on the page.
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The Crucial Ingredient Your Story May Be Missing

If you’re hearing that your story lacks structure or impact, you might be missing the interconnected cohesion of plot, stakes, and character.
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The Case for Shrinking Your Novel

Even experienced novelists overwrite. Here are five insights about ruthlessly cutting a manuscript—and why that’s a good thing.
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Edit Your Book As If It’s a Screenplay

A writer’s script-editing experience helped fix her novel’s problems with pacing, flat characters, and scenes that didn’t propel the story.
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Crafting Ethical and Moral Dilemmas in Crime Fiction

In crime fiction, the most powerful moments often aren’t about car chases or shootouts—they’re about impossible choices.
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Using the Workplace to Add Depth to Your Novel

Using the workplace as more than a backdrop can supercharge the stakes, conflict, and character development of your fiction.
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Make Good Knots: How Learning to Knit Saved My Novel

Learning to knit renewed one author’s confidence, allowing her to take a risk revising a manuscript that was already out on submission.
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Prologues That Work and Why

Prologues get a bad rap as backstory or info dumps but, done well, they can intrigue readers and ignite interest in the story to come.
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Coach Your Characters: A Life Coach’s Toolkit Offers a New Lens

Life coaches help clients gain insights about how we shape our own life stories, and the same tools can be used to create richer characters.
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What Does It Mean to Have a Compelling Voice in Your Story?

In storytelling, voice can refer to three different elements: character voice, narrative voice, and author voice—and they can often overlap.
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Writing Lessons from Jane Austen: Cause and Effect in Pride and Prejudice

While many 19th century novels have fallen by the wayside, Austen’s continual appeal may be understood in the way she built her plots.
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Breaking Bread: The Role of Food in Building Character

Food is a powerful storytelling element that can help develop characters, and a great tool for putting ‘show, don’t tell’ into practice.
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Write Where You Know

Whether you choose a real or fictional location, the more detail and depth you can infuse into your setting, the better you’ll draw readers into your story.
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Developing Antagonism in Your Story

The more clearly you develop and articulate antagonism in your story, the more your protagonist’s struggle and victory will shine.