Have you ever read a story and when a character does something, you find yourself thinking, “Okay, but why?” This is a question you don’t want your readers to ask if you don’t have a plan how to answer it in the story. Characters should never do things just to make the story happen. Let’s…
Tag: Writing Corner
Writing Corner: Story Maps
It’s not usually the case for short stories, but novels will often come with a story map. As someone who loves maps and is very visual, I’m always happy when a story has a map in it. Maps can help you picture where things are taking place as you are reading. Not everyone feels the…
Writing Corner: Group Words
English has a lot of little quirks, but one of the quirkiest is all the words it has for groups of animals. If you look at a site like Owlcation, you can find a huge list of words, many of which sounds like they’re just made up, but probably were used very long ago. Still,…
Writing Corner: The Right To Write
Today’s post is written by guest writer, Susannah Bianchi. Check out her slightly-on-slant essays and novels at athingirl.com. The Right To Write The Right to Write is my favorite go-to writing book by esteemed author, Julia Cameron. Though I have others…Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott, Stephen King’s On Writing, hers is the one I…
Writing Corner: Writing Spaces
When it comes to writing productively, when and where we write are very important and very individual. Everyone is going to write best in different circumstances based on their personality. Personally, my ideal writing situation is in the evening in a coffee shop. I’m a night person so that is when I’m the most awake…
Writing Corner: Cliffhangers
Two of the things that keeps people reading your story are mystery and tension: not only things that the readers doesn’t know but very important things to the characters: things that could make or break their whole lives even. One way to do this is with cliffhangers. A cliffhanger is when the story stops at…
Writing Corner: Accuracy in Fiction
The good thing about writing fiction is that it’s not true. That means you don’t have to cite sources or do any research. If the facts don’t fit your story, you can change the facts. It’s pretty sweet. But does a story have to be accurate at all? If so, how much? That is what…
Writing Corner: Your Audience
There are two parts to the writing experience: the reader and the writer. If it is something like a diary that you are not going to show anyone, then you are both the reader and the writer. But there are always both. The people who you would like to read your story are your audience….
Writing Corner: The Period
The period, meaning the dot at the end of a sentence, is a pretty straightforward piece of punctuation. After all, it just comes at the end of a sentence, right? This is true, although it can be used a little differently sometimes in fiction writing. At the End of a Sentence There are five ways…
Writing Corner: Exposition
Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. Conflict might be the seed of a story, but the story has to planted somewhere and be about something. We want to make sure the reader understands the ideas in the story. This is where we have to guess what they already know. We might assume the reader could…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 