Improve Your Writing

As an author, what steps can you take to write a book that the vast majority of readers will want to read all the way through?

Knowing your character’s worldview, carry-in, and carry-over issues will help you build strong cause-and-effect that propels your story forward.

Giving your beta readers structure makes it easier for them, and helps ensure that your specific concerns will be addressed.

Limit telling to between-scene summaries. In-scene, showing is what pulls readers into your story through clear actions and emotions.

Choosing a name, either for a real human or a fictional one, involves a blend of logic and intuition and can feel deeply consequential.

As an early architect of the novel form, Austen’s use of a unifying thematic question contributed to the development of long-form narratives.

When executed well, a memoir with a message can touch lives through the power of personal narrative combined with practical wisdom.

Whatever settings you choose, they need to align with your theme, support the plot, and help define your characters.

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.

When you manipulate spaces in between with intention, your readers will stay intrigued by emotion, mystery, and ambiguity.

When we show our character’s cognitive dissonance—wrestling with conflicting beliefs—readers can’t help but relate and empathize.

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.

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.

A strong story opening might introduce your character's normal world, while also making clear the untenable situation they must change.

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.

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.

Boundaries within ourselves—our limits, standards, knowing which interactions are worthwhile—are as important as those we set with others.

Like a genie in a bottle, flashbacks can be wonderful and terrible things. If not carefully controlled, flashbacks can get disastrously out of hand.

A brief but super-powered lesson from one of our recent webinars about the how to avoid overly coy and "mysterious" backstory in fiction.

MS Word is great for collaboration using Track Changes, but can it offer drag & drop organization like Scrivener? Yes, with a little know-how.

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

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

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

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.

No matter what you’re writing, emotional intimacy between characters is important to creating authentic relationships on the page.