Improve Your Writing

Just as a painter uses brushes and colors to blend and create, writers can experiment with tropes to make stories both familiar and refreshing.

Understanding how to use them, and how to balance different types of scenes within a single narrative, is crucial for becoming a skilled storyteller.

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.

The more faith you have in your story’s structure, the more you’ll become the safety net your reader is hoping for.

Playing around with different storytelling forms during manuscript revision can lessen anxiety and reveal new possibilities.

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.

Aspiring writers are inundated with rules to follow—but writing is creative, so don’t look to prescriptions or those who preach them.

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

Twists feel “twisty” because the author has carefully engineered the story to mislead readers via the protagonist’s journey and assumptions.

One way to cultivate a loyal audience is by sharing compelling content, but it’s important to understand the needs of your target audience.

A new book, The Grim Reader, helps authors understand how to write convincingly about drugs and their use.

By paying attention to how you are impacted by story, you can learn to trace those effects back to the techniques that elicited them.

A good novel has everything teen brains are primed to crave—excitement, emotion, and escape.

For a memorable story, give your main character a strong motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating decisions leading to an impossible choice.

Going too fast is one of the biggest mistakes storytellers make. When you arrive at a moment readers have been waiting for, slow things down.

It takes practice to write immersive descriptions that draw readers in, without going overboard and risking boredom or loss of attention.

An author considers how we often try to turn ourselves into other kinds of writers instead of following our internal compass.

Shonda Rhimes’s Netflix series is a master class in amping up stakes and keeping viewers invested in the characters’ outcomes.

Too many books and not enough time? One author learns that speed-reading print and audiobook versions simultaneously can enhance retention.

In marketing, “proof of concept” means testing an idea for sales potential before going all-in. Here’s how to apply that to your book.

As with abstract painting, fiction can find worth in technique rather than specific meaning—emphasizing not the What, but the How.

When author and readers have little in common, what makes writing relatable? A teacher examines Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to find out.

To create unforgettable scenes, purposefully choose settings that trigger character emotions, intensify conflicts, or evoke specific moods.

To be vivid on the page, each character you write should display life-long emotional responses to wounds that occurred in their past.

Flashback can be a potent tool for presenting essential backstory, as long as you apply it without interrupting the story’s forward momentum.