There are a ton of writing resources out there, and it can be difficult to know which ones are actually useful for your writing. The truth is? Many of them can be useful, depending on what your needs are as a writer. That is, whether you need help with things such as plotting, characterization, description, …
Self-care is important on a personal level. Everyone needs different types of self-care, including writers. But when you hear the word, do you think bubble baths, face masks, a glass of wine and a soppy movie? Sure, that can be it if that’s what you need. But self-care is so much more than pampering yourself, …
At what point is your novel is done? Completed? Finished? How many revisions and edits are enough? Basically, when is enough, enough? I recently reread my own self-pubbed novel, The Days Without You, and damnit if I didn’t find another error—a missing word. Even though it was a teeny, tiny preposition that my eyes almost …
This is a bit of a rambling post, so fair warning. When I was early in my writing career, back in my teenager days when I was writing bad Harry Potter fan fiction with my best friend at the time, I barely knew a thing about the craft of writing. (And no, I’m not knocking …
If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s when mental illness is written poorly in fiction. Bipolar is not just happy and sad. Schizophrenia is not multiple personalities. Over the years, people with mental illness have also been portrayed as violent. The truth is that people with mental illness are ten times more likely …
Little words can have big meaning. What exactly are prepositions? Well, they are words that begin prepositional phrases. You may be thinking, “Okay, what the heck is a prepositional phrase?” Simply put, it’s a modifying phrase that includes a preposition and the object of the preposition (in other words, a noun). It is any word …
Past. Present. Future. Many folks think there are just those three tenses. There are actually different subsets of each tense, such as continuous (also called progressive), perfect, and perfect continuous. Each tense and its subsets are all written a different way, and all have different meanings. Now, tense differs from grammatical mood, such as conditional, …
If you’re a writer, you probably have heard the phrase “Said is dead” given as writing advice. When I search that saying, I come up with hundreds of blogs that offer alternatives to the word said. (I also come up with some song on the first page of results. Interesting.) People say that this particular …
With so many rules and different style guides, it’s hard to know what punctuation to use where in your writing. From comma splices to overuse of ellipses, there are a lot of mistakes you can make that cause you to look less than your best. I know—we all make mistakes. The mistakes I’m going to …
No, I don’t mean procreation when I say “creating” people—that’s a whole separate topic we’re not going to get into. Here, we’re talking about making up characters for fictional stories. What’s great about creating characters for a story is that humans are so diverse. We, as people, are so utterly interesting as a species. From …