How Balance Can Lead to Your Best Writing
Great craft skills are essential, but without this, your best writing will elude you.
Great craft skills are essential, but without this, your best writing will elude you.
Early drafts can contain writing that’s too dark. Here’s two Donald Masss’ strategies for addressing this.
The midpoints in your life tell you who you are. Understand them and you’ll understand the story you’re trying to tell.
In her book Voice First, Sonya Huber talks about the three voice centers in your body and the one that will lead to your truest work.
We often think the voice in a piece of writing comes from the author. In Voice First Sonya Huber considers the other elements that can serve as a voice’s origins.
As writers, we’re taught to whittle the many voices inside us into The One true writing voice we’ll always use. But what if that’s wrong?
To tell a great story, you need to identify the right voice and then channel her.
Personal stories heal us when they settle the events weighing down our hearts and jacking up our nervous systems. But that only happens when we know what they mean.
Whether you’re telling stories through pictures, thinking about how to insert your “I,” or considering the micro form, HippoCamp’s presenters have some great advice for you.
Need a creative boost? Check out these tips from a few of HippoCamp’s 2022 flash presenters.
The perceived freedom of the spiral structure is what attracts many writers. But as Jane Alison reveals, rule following leads to a successful one.
There are two ways we cope with anxiety—worry and avoidance. Your job is to figure out how you’ll reveal this in your manuscript.
Often, change happens in opposition. When we understand the things working in opposition in our stories, we can use them to maintain our story’s tension.
Jane Alison encourages us to envision our writing not as a tsunami of story, but instead as a series of smaller waves that propel your story arc forward.
When building our characters we sometimes hack away at attributes, hoping to unearth something that will engage readers. Instead, do this.
So much of character development is about the push and pull between what our characters want and their biggest flaws.
Strong beginnings have common attributes that can be boiled down to one word–they all SUCK.
Baking a pie while blindfolded is a lot like writing a first draft. It’s messy, and even when you’re not sure what you’re doing, you must trust the process.
For the past six months, I’ve told you and every writer I know to buy Allison’s new book Seven Drafts. Now you finally can.
In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder discusses the three-act structure and shares his invaluable beat sheet where he maps out the moments every story needs.