Improve Your Writing

When completing a readable draft left one author exhausted and overwhelmed, these three steps helped him start writing again.

Good editors are expensive, so the best time for a full manuscript review is when you’re pretty sure your book is ready for publication.

If your subject already has a large existing fandom, how can you quantify that audience, using the data to impress agents, publishers, and editors?

A prologue can open the door to your story and entice the reader in, or throw up a barrier that delays or prevents their engagement.

A great villain character should have complex motivations and be able to evoke sympathy from readers.

The writers who get their books into the world are those who find a middle ground between refining their work and endlessly tinkering.

Science says these three techniques can draw your readers in, keep them engaged, and provide them with a compelling experience.

You can mine the first paragraphs of well-written novels for four critical components that keep readers hooked.

What makes a good writer? Relentless internal drive, a thick skin for editorial feedback, and reading voraciously across many genres.

From appealing to short attention spans to offering no-fuss ways to play in another sandbox, short story writing has many benefits.

Writing a book with multiple authors requires trust, vulnerability and patience. But done right, group writing has some surprising benefits.

When we’re dealt life-altering circumstances, how do we stay true to creative ambitions while finding a whole new way of existing?

Your writing might soar to new heights when you make weather—and the words describing it—an important element in your characters’ lives.

Along with sex and death, money is a topic with evergreen appeal. So when you write about money, you put the odds of a breakout on your side.

Some writers struggle with ever getting one word of their Great Idea down on the page, for fear of crafting an imperfect beginning.

Some writers can finish a book all by themselves, but even more of them have support systems, deadlines, teachers, exercises, instructions and help.

To write something that connects on a universal level, concentrate on specifics. Small truths are easier for readers to identify with.

An elaborately structured plot, without clearly-defined character goals and motivations, is like mapping a trip and calling it a vacation.

Shifting from memoir to fiction allows painful memories to be expressed, while sharing the hard-won wisdom we’ve gained through experience.

Subtext, the real conversation hidden by surface talk, can deepen the story with unpredictable outcomes and emotion.

It takes grit to seek and implement qualified feedback, and to keep finding ways to improve a manuscript even after you’ve given it your all.

If you’d like to see your work in national publications—and get paid—tailor your essay to smoothly fit their voice and mission.

A half-hour’s writing might yield only 500, 300, even a mere 100 words. But a half-hour’s writing over 7 or 8 months: a book’s worth of words.

Anticipation—“Will it happen or won’t it?”—keeps readers on edge, and we can make use of their need to know by building scenes that cater to it.

Why one freelancer believes that spending too much time at a computer holds writers back from producing their best work.