Reprinted with permission. First appeared online at Nothing in the Rulebook, March 16, 2022. If you’re a writer, chances are the challenge of writing microfiction stems from figuring out how to pare your story down to the essentials, rather than how to fill up the space. What is microfiction? First of all, if you’re not […]
How long should your book be? That depends on your genre, story, budget, and marketing plan. Word count matters in publishing and to readers.
All writers have been told to “use the 5 senses,” but rarely are they told how to do that. When Amber decided to articulate how to write smell, she turned to Jeff Zentner for beautiful examples and advice. Here’s how you can write smell.
Both editors and writers aim to inspire, inform, teach, and entertain their readers as they deeply and intensely explore their subject matter and create a wide range of materials that appear on and in a multitude of venues and publications. With humble appreciation, I offer some resources that might be useful for writers of fiction and nonfiction.
Whether you’re a fiction or nonfiction writer, developing a writing process will make you a more prolific writer and improve your craft. With a process in place, the act of writing becomes like any other routine task, such as getting out of bed or showering. It’s no longer a question whether you’re going to sit down and write—and that’s a powerful thing. Here’s how you can do that.
Fiction has an obvious story arc, but memoirs and narrative nonfiction benefit from a structure that supports compelling storytelling too. Consider that your story, whether real or imagined, has a protagonist: you, if you’re writing a memoir, or a main character. Even a self-help book has a protagonist—the reader.
With stay-at-home and safer-at-home orders still in varying degrees of effect, our lives continue to be suspended in uncertainty. Most people are now working from home, and many people have watched helplessly as their jobs went away. Suddenly, we find ourselves sequestered with our households while everyone is in a state of high anxiety. Mix […]
I guess I’m an extreme version of what I’ve heard called a “pantser.” Not only do I plot by the seat of my pants, I do everything that way. I’ve read the usual books on writing (Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, On Writing by Stephen King, Plotting and Writing Suspense by Patricia Highsmith) […]
As an author, one of the most important decisions you must make is what point of view you choose to use to tell your story. Point of view influences everything from how close readers feel to your characters to your word choice and sentence structure. It is the lens through which you tell your story. […]
When someone refers to point of view in writing, they are referring to the lens through which the story is told. This encompasses everything from who is telling the story to who the villain is to how close the reader feels to the characters and events. By choosing the right lens, an author can effectively […]