@josiah Can you take a look at the issue Linyang described? The same thing happens to me.

Why is Arrowood a villain? Almost everyone on earth has memories they would get rid of if they had the chance, even if it’s just the memory of something embarrassing they did that keeps making them cringe years later.

But plenty of people have far more serious memories they want to escape. It’s a cliché that a character drinks or uses drugs to f…[Read more]

Dostoyevsky does that thing where every character symbolizes a different answer to a thematic question (or at least a different variation on a basic theme like “love”). His books are very PG-13, but excellent examples of thematic writing taken to the extreme. I recently finished his book The Idiot, in which the main character represents Christian…[Read more]

I haven’t written a story about this, but I need to some day. I have the question, but don’t yet have good answers.

I’ve seen a lot of friends thrown into hopelessness by the church.

Usually it’s because they experienced or witnessed emotional, physical, or (it was this one in most cases, let’s be honest) sexual abuse perpetrated by their par…[Read more]

Unless rebirth is a major theme in your story, if you want readers to believe your characters actually die, it’s almost universally recommended to keep characters dead.

When you bring a single character back, you are then an author who brings back dead characters.

As to your specific question, I think the sadness of a dead character lingers and…[Read more]

Fantastic advice from @bama-rose .

My productivity increased when I started setting deadlines for myself.

If I have eight total hours to edit this draft, then I sit down, start my timer, and work at it for however long. When I’m done with a session, I log my time in a spreadsheet. When that time adds up to eight hours, I’m done with that draft…[Read more]

@josiah Thanks, Josiah. Yeah, it’s dim line with blurry boundaries. I might need new glasses.

@writergirl101 Thank you! What’s your story about?

@zee Great question!

I usually start with a mood, build that into a setpiece (usually the climax or very beginning of a story) with arbitrary placeholder characters, and then try to reverse engineer a plot in both directions. As I write the characters into scenes, they take on a life of their own.

@daeus-lamb Thank you! Trying to figure out what I should have done better after beta-ing for you was a huge part in making it.

The Redwall books by Brian Jacques have been the most impactful to me. I’ll be the odd one out and say Lord of the Rings hasn’t been very impactful to me, because they bore me to tears and I’ve never properly read all of Return of the King =P I love the Hobbit and Children of Hurin, though.

The Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, the Dark is…[Read more]

“…I pretty much based my character [in God’s Not Dead] off of these guys that I see who are just angry — they’re just filled with anger and hatred.” -Kevin Sorbo, who wasn’t a very good villain

“Once you know what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same d…[Read more]