Improve Your Writing

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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
How to Deliver Backstory Without Confusing the Reader

How to Deliver Backstory Without Confusing the Reader

A brief but super-powered lesson from one of our recent webinars about the how to avoid overly coy and "mysterious" backstory in fiction.
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.
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Writing the Other: 4 Not So Easy (But Doable!) Steps

There’s no formula for “perfect” characterization of marginalized people, but these tips can pave the way to better representation—and better writing!
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3 Elements That Make Historical Romance Successful

If you approach a book with a writer’s eye, even the most pleasurable, light reading can teach you something that can enrich your own storytelling craft.
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Emotional Intimacy Between Characters Isn’t Just for Romance Novels

No matter what you’re writing, emotional intimacy between characters is important to creating authentic relationships on the page.
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Tropes: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Just as a painter uses brushes and colors to blend and create, writers can experiment with tropes to make stories both familiar and refreshing.
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Scene, Summary, Postcard: 3 Types of Scenes in Commercial, Upmarket, and Literary Fiction

Understanding how to use them, and how to balance different types of scenes within a single narrative, is crucial for becoming a skilled storyteller.
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When—and Why—Reveals Don’t Work

It’s an author’s job to create questions that readers crave the answers to, but questions posed with unclear stakes or context can backfire.
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Structure: The Safety Net for Your Memoir

The more faith you have in your story’s structure, the more you’ll become the safety net your reader is hoping for.
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3 Ways to Experiment with Memoir Structure to Improve Your Narrative Arc

Playing around with different storytelling forms during manuscript revision can lessen anxiety and reveal new possibilities.
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What Taylor Swift’s Vault Tracks Can Teach You About Not Killing Your Darlings

If a scene, storyline, character, or image doesn’t quite belong in your story, save it for later use—as Taylor Swift does with song ideas.
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Writing Rules That Beg to Be Broken

Aspiring writers are inundated with rules to follow—but writing is creative, so don’t look to prescriptions or those who preach them.
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Demystifying Miscreant Memories and Crafting a More Authentic Narrative

Memoirists owe it to readers to tell them the truth. But what do you do when the truth isn’t black and white?