Latest Articles

How Parents Can Build Sustainable Writing Habits
Writing at any stage of life can be difficult. Some stages present especially complex challenges, like raising children. Your time, resources, and even your body (if you’re nurturing an infant) are no longer your own. How do you craft characters and plots when you’re stepping on Duplos while cooking dinner and your toddler asks so many ponderous questions that you can’t concentrate? To all the parents whose coffee has gone cold, you’re not alone.
How to Write Emotionally Powerful Physical Pain without Coming Across as a Sadist
Writers are a brutal sect. We spend our free time inventing new methods of torturing characters, all while cackling like gremlins over the tears of heartbroken readers. “I’m off to kill someone” is a phrase tossed around like a tennis ball in writing communities. To the outside observer, our dark humor may seem psychotic. What normal person beats their brainchildren into a pulp only to quip about it later? Although the jokes are often in poor taste, suffering draws in writers, and readers, for better reasons than mental instability.
3 Tips for Writing Fiction Children Will Love to Read
So, you dream of writing a children’s book. And not only do you believe you have a premise that will entertain, bring laughter and joy, or make an impact on developing minds, you have a passion for reaching kids. What better mission to embark on? I say go for it! But before you send off your manuscript to an acquisitions editor, be aware that the genre has its own set of nuances that make it distinct from higher reading levels.
8 Ways to Easily Research Places You’ve Never Visited
If you write contemporary fiction, you’ve probably run into the problem of choosing a setting. A story’s setting is as influential to the plot as the characters who populate it. A book set in Paris will be vastly different from one set in a small Midwestern town. But what if you’ve never been to the locations in your story? How important is accuracy? The short answer: Authentic details bring settings to life.
How to Cultivate Powerful Moments of Wonder in Storytelling, Part 2
Have you ever set down a book, startled that the author turned your outlook upside down with tiny black marks on paper? Do you want to write stories that have the same effect on others?