Back Story, Flashbacks, and Foreshadowing Back story is the story that happened before your story starts. As the writer, it's good to know the history of your characters—what brought them to the place
Continue readingWhen you decide you're going to write a novel, soon after you have imagined your characters and mapped out an outline, you'll have to decide on tense and point of view. We covered point of view in the
Continue readingSince I can't think of a Point of View image, I'm just going to show you the view out my window right now. Yes, I love living here. 🙂 This tip is for beginning writers and it's important that it's
Continue readingWhy do we sometimes say that a person we know is “quite a character”? You know the type I'm talking about. This person is distinctive, amusing, mystical, humorous, larger than life, etc. In
Continue readingWhen it comes to writing there are two kinds of “voice”: the author's voice and character voice. Trying to teach someone how to write Author's voice is like trying to teach someone
Continue readingIn the last tip, Tackling the First Draft, we talked about how putting words on the page is like making clay—creating malleable material that you can later sculpt through revisions. It's not important
Continue readingMAKING CLAY Now that you have the story idea, characters, and you've mapped out the major plot points, it's time to start writing that first draft. To use GINGERBREAD MAN as an example: the story is about
Continue readingAfter I've spent time thinking about my story and loosely pinning scenes onto the three act structure + beat sheet, I try to get a sense just through my imagining, what the main character looks like. I
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