Writing Advice of the Week

Three Craft Reads For Revising Your Story

Reading Time: 4 minutes Mastering story edits isn’t easy, but there are a few books I’ve recommended to my clients repeatedly to assist them during edits, and these are also books I use myself when editing my work. The good news: Once you’ve absorbed the material covered in these books, you’ll be able to apply the lessons over and over without really thinking about them. They’ll become second-nature to your writerly process.

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Traveling Through Space-Time: Physics VS Fantasy

Reading Time: 8 minutes As fun as it is to conceptualize, philosophize, and ‘what if’ oneself through astrophysics, it’s important to know what the scientific and literary rules are for space travel so you can either use them to your story’s advantage (and please your readers with your knowledge) or disregard them intentionally in pursuit of imaginative creative expression.

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Reader Experience Depends on Perspective (Use it Well)

Reading Time: 7 minutes Choosing your point of view and narrative perspective was one of the first choices you made when penning your manuscript, but how can you be sure that default perspective was the right one for your story? Immerse the reader in your story world and set them on a path to build emotional connections to your characters and their circumstances.

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Writing Advice of the Week: The Craft is in Drafts

Reading Time: 11 minutes When you write your first draft, you’re telling yourself the story, as you need to hear it, to make the best sense of it. That first draft is typically when you learn about your main character’s goals and motivations, the barriers or villains that hinder their success, and what the ultimate stakes are if they don’t succeed. You also meet the rest of the cast and get to know them, understand them, see them moving about in your story world. But when you tell your story to your reader, you begin to uncover what the reader needs.

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Writing Advice of the Week: Writing is an Act of Bravery

Reading Time: 11 minutes When writing your book, it’s easy to get bogged down by craft and stylistic advice, storytelling methods, and research on genre conventions, structural maps, reader trends, and more. But if you’re writing a book, especially if this is your first book, it may be best to put away the advice while you’re getting that first draft down on paper.

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Writing Advice of the Week: Become a Writer

Reading Time: 9 minutes If December brings about reflection in you, you, too, may be undergoing profound change as you decide what you want out of your life and how best to go ahead and get it. While undergoing fundamental changes in who we are is a part of many creative professional pursuits, the change process itself can come with its own set of gifts to help us get through the tumult of change.

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