Improve Your Writing

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How to Move Your Reader Toward Transformation

This excerpt from Nina Amir’s Change the World One Book at a Time examines how nonfiction authors can best effect change in readers.
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Write Your Book Like You’d Run a Startup

Sharing his work-in-progress has helped one writer build confidence and conviction about who his readers are and what they’re interested in.
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Crafting Cinematic Action by Scene Segmenting

By thinking like a filmmaker—planning your beats, deciding your shots—you create a vivid experience that pulls readers into the story.
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Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Use Stress Responses to Strengthen Your Scenes

Understanding stress responses as learned survival strategies can help you turn every high-stakes scene into character development on the page.
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Please Allow Your Characters Moments of Happiness

When a story barrels from one conflict to the next, hitting pause for a well-placed glimmer of light can benefit both characters and readers.
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Why Your Memoir Feels Like Rambling (and How to Fix It)

Having analyzed over 1000 memoir manuscripts in a 15 year span, Wendy Dale found two linked components of powerful, plot-driven storytelling.
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It’s Not About You: Your Memoir Is Someone Else’s Story

The person on the page can’t be the person writing the book. Because if your life has changed enough to write about, you aren’t that person anymore.
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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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What I Got Wrong About Memoir and What I Now Understand About the Genre

An author reconsiders her biases, finding the best memoir writing to be courageous, complex, and capable of transforming others and ourselves.
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How Revising My Novel While Querying Helped Me Win a Book Award

When agents suggest further revision, we might need time and distance to see our MS through their eyes—but doing the work can pay dividends.
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What Makes Character Voice Memorable: Emotion

This excerpt from a new craft book by Jordan Rosenfeld explores the many ways our fictional characters manifest their internal emotions.
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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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How to Reconnect with a Draft You No Longer Want to Write

If the manuscript you once felt passionate about has fallen silent, here’s why this may be happening and how to gently find your way back.
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Why Fictionalize Memoir?

A writer wishing to bear witness and breathe new life into her family’s stories compares how three authors blended memoir with fiction.
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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.
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The Activist Memoir: How to Write for Change

While many memoirs’ stories are personal, others are social or political—and the best succeed by making readers feel what the author felt.