WRITING TIPS

April is national poetry month, a reminder of the importance of poets in human history and culture. We can use it to remember famous...

A little laughter goes a long way when your characters and readers are stressing about an impending war. Almost every genre can do with a...

Somehow, this is already my 50th post, so I wanted to take a slightly different, more fun approach to writing and discuss some writing...

While the beginning of a story sets up the world, people, and themes, the end wraps it all together. It’s either a reward or a punishment...

It’s really easy to put down a book after reading a few pages, but it becomes increasingly more difficult to do so as you go on. Once...

When writing their first draft, some authors keep their future readers in mind at all times and others only write because they need to...

SPOILER ALERT: I talk about some famous plot twists below. Most spoilers are for very popular books, which I selected because I assume...

Why is it that the best plot twists always seem to make sense but you never could have predicted them? Foreshadowing is a literary device...

Almost every story can be traced back to some core plotline that can be found in other books of that type. Harry Potter is about the...

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” said Stephen King. Many writers have sworn off adverbs entirely and many others stand by them...

Humans have been writing for over 4,500 years. You would think humankind would have discovered a way to make writing easy. After all, one...

Let me start by saying, it is doable. You can have two, three, or twenty-seven stories you are working on and make progress on all of...

Happy New Year! As you start to work toward (or give up on) your New Year’s resolutions, now is a good time to think about your writing...

A new month is just around the corner, and for writers, there’s something exceptionally special about this one. November is National...

The old mentor, the quest, the secret heir… These are all examples of common tropes in fantasy. If you’re an avid fantasy reader, you can...

For those of us in the United States, we are now about a month into the school year. High school is a transformative and enjoyable...

Near the end of July, I joined the board of The Young Writers Initiative (TYWI), a fiscally sponsored nonprofit organization dedicated to...

Writing a novel is an incredibly rewarding experience. The ability to say, even if only to yourself, I sent characters on the journey of...

I recently wrapped up final edits on The Prisons of Magic, so I thought this post was in order. From the moment you realize you’re almost...

All writers are readers at heart. For most of us, our love for storytelling spawned from the joy of reading stories. Readers look at...