Three Weak Conflicts
Conflict makes or breaks a story. A strong conflict grabs readers and keeps them engaged; a weak conflict leaves them bored and uninvested. Very often, when readers love the premise […]
Conflict makes or breaks a story. A strong conflict grabs readers and keeps them engaged; a weak conflict leaves them bored and uninvested. Very often, when readers love the premise […]
Reducing word count sometimes feels like the holy grail of revisions. Countless blog posts make long lists of words that you should ruthlessly excise from your manuscript, ranging from “really” […]
This post is part of the Writers Write All Blog Hop hosted by A Writer Named Charley. Thank you for organizing, Charley. One of the hardest shifts I had to […]
The damsel in distress is one of the oldest and most pervasive clichés in fiction and also one of the most reviled. So wide is the knowledge that damsels in […]
Ever since those first stills of his character design, Jared Leto’s Joker has left many of us scratching our heads, trying to figure out why the portrayal seems so wrong. […]
My discussion of fictional haircuts leaves out one possibly pertinent fact: I included a dramatic haircut in my own novel Among the Red Stars. So I’m going to talk about […]
Many people in the YA community were less than enthused when the Locus Awards announced their 2016 finalists. The YA finalists were all men, one of whom was nominated twice, […]
ETA #2: Since the writing, Inkitt has rebranded itself as a Wattpad-style online publishing platform. This post will remain up as a reminder of the deceptive and predatory marketing tactics […]
The goal of this post is to help beginning writers by pointing out some of the common mistakes I see in first novels. Not the obvious stuff you know to […]
You’ve seen her in every historical adventure or fantasy film you’ve ever watched: The plucky female character who wears pants, refuses to get married, and shares her outspoken opinions about […]