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Nothing gets a reader to love a book quite so much as getting them to engage with it. Passive readers experience a story and move on, but engaged readers mull over the plot, theorize about character motivations, and fantasize about paths not taken (sometimes enough to write them), all while the …
[Read more...] about Want A Cult Following? Hide Secrets In Your Writing
Have you ever been pulled over by the grammar police for head-hopping? It’s one of the most common editor pet peeves, but a device many authors swear by, claiming that their readers certainly aren’t complaining. Maybe not, but I’d still advise against it, and in this article, I’ll be telling you …
[Read more...] about Why Head-Hopping Hurts Your Writing And How To Avoid It
Few genres have such a distinctive look and feel as noir fiction. A successor of ‘hard-boiled’ or ‘pulp’ fiction, you’ll know the conventions of noir even if you’ve never read The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep – seedy urban underbellies, trench-coat-clad PIs, cigarettes, femme fatales, whiskey, …
[Read more...] about Embrace Noir Conventions To Improve Your Writing
Pathos is down on its luck these days; appeals to emotion are bound up in reasonable fears of ‘post-truth’ and ‘populist’ writing, but I’m here to tell you that intelligent use of pathos can make your fiction better. Now, pathos certainly has its dark side. Many of the TV, radio, and internet …
[Read more...] about Pathos Is Not A Dirty Word, And It Belongs In A Writer’s Vocabulary
I remember my very first writing critique. I was meeting with a group of women I worked with; two of them were acquaintances, the other two were complete strangers. And I was so nervous. I walked into that writer’s group feeling shaky and sweaty and afraid of being unmasked as a failure. Can you …
[Read more...] about How To Be (And Keep) A Highly Effective Critique Partner
Writers have a lot of different ways of getting to know their characters. Character biographies, for example, allow you to figure out a character’s backstory, defining who they are and where they’ve come from. Hot-seating, a technique borrowed from actors, involves either imagining a character or …
[Read more...] about Get To Know Your Characters Better With This Novel Device
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