Jacob

Writers are (or certainly should be) constantly growing in their craft. We work on it every week, every month, every year, and as time goes on we learn how to make our stories better, stronger, deeper.

As we grow to be better writers than we were before, it’s very easy to look back on old writing, cringe, hide it in a deepest corner of d…[Read more]

RALLY TOGETHER, MEERKATS, AND DRAW YOUR SWORDS PENS. The next guild war has begun!!

If you haven’t been around for any of the past guild wars, don’t worry, it’s pretty straight forward. A guild war is where each of the guilds competes against the other guilds to try write the best scene/the most words/etc. This week it’s about writing a s…[Read more]

There’s a piece of writing advice I hear all the time “Never edit while you write the first draft” and I wanted to share a bit of my POV about this. A bit about how I don’t think it’s a good bit of advice and my reasons why.

First of all: No. No no nooo. With all these ‘writing advice’ tips, they NEED to be taken with a grain of salt. Don’t just…[Read more]

Yep guys, this is basically the same as the introduce your story topic, but with characters instead!

1) pick one or two characters
2) share a little bit about them/their personality/their role in the story
3) share what their character arc is, and anything else you want to note

So I’m going to go first again, just because that’s…[Read more]

Bear with me for a moment as I tell you a little story about my day today.

I spent a long time this morning sorting through emails, replying to guild things, organising a lesson I’m teaching at a local school tomorrow, and doing everything else on my do-list other than writing this.

Why?

Because I had no clue what I was doing for this week’s…[Read more]

Before we begin: this is an important announcement, so please take the time to read it all.

First of all, thank you to everyone who filled in the survey. It was very helpful and I hope that we’ll be able to use your feedback to make the guilds even more awesome than ever!

Our vision for the guilds is to form a tight-knit group of creators…[Read more]

It’s a question I see people asking quite a lot around the place. “Should my paragraphs be long or short?” Closely followed by “How long should my chapters be?”

I also see people around the place saying “Your chapters should be at least 5 thousand words long” or “don’t write short paragraphs.” Or sometimes people will go the other way and say…[Read more]

Word sprints are life savers. And there’s no better accountability than to sprint out some words with friends.

This topic is for that. If you’re writing, come here and say so! Maybe someone else will also be online and you can do some sprinting together. Or maybe just saying “I’m writing” will be a good bit of encouragement even if no one sees…[Read more]

When we write our novels, I think we spend a lot of time thinking about the actions scenes, the plot, the character development, and the setting descriptions, but one thing that we overlook, is how important the dialogue is.

The conversations that our characters have, are just as important as everything else. To use K.M. Weiland’s words, all…[Read more]

Since the summer months have been a little slower around the guilds, I’m thinking we’ll have a bit of a break this week. Because breaks are good.

Instead of having a new activity, you can check out some of the previous ones that you might’ve missed!

Another fun thing to do—we could share some writing resources! When you have a question…[Read more]

Calling all Meerkats–

The guildmasters have been considering the success of the guilds, so that we can try make these even better and more useful for you guys. So this is where you get to give your input!

Below is the link to a forum that you can fill out, with a couple of questions about the guilds, etc. It would be great if everyone…[Read more]

It feels like I only just posted the last week’s activity and now we’re already on to the next one. Goodness me.

I think next year we’re going to have to take a slight break over the summer months because everyone’s really busy. (Thoughts on that, guys?)

This week, I’m going to take a look at what the small details and wording in our…[Read more]