Category: Writing Fiction

  • Type Your Characters – Part 8: Enneagram Seven

    by Lindsey Brackett @LindsBrac With the start of a new year—a new decade!—you’ve likely had your inbox inundated with information on how to be your best self. Whether you’re actively seeking self-reflection or merely deep diving so you can develop more authentic characters, I can’t recommend an Enneagram study enough. If…

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  • Writing Holidays into Your Fiction

    by Aaron Gansky @ADGansky As we delve headlong into another holiday season (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s etc.…), I hope you and your family have a wonderful and restful time. But I’m also aware the holidays can be just as stressful as they are joyful. Cleaning house…

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  • A Novelist’s Christmas—Up on the Bookshelf

    by DiAnn Mills @DiAnnMills Up on the bookshelf Editors hail. Out jump agents, writers travail. Down through the aisles With lots of books, All with metaphors and crazy hooks. Ho Ho Ho A writer would know. Ho Ho Ho A writer would know. Oh, up on a bookshelf Click Click…

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  • Dissecting Your Character’s Motivation in Your Novel

    @DiAnnMills Dissecting character motivation ushers in the potential of improving your novel to bestselling status. Writers sift through a character’s behavior to find the inner quality that drives the character into action. This core, the deep physiological problem plaguing our character, must be resolved before the character can change and…

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  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Eighth (and Final) Rule for Writing Fiction

    @ADGansky Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. –Kurt Vonnegut Aside from keeping…

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  • What’s Stopping You from Creating a Great Story?

    @DiAnnMills Are you a writer who dreams about creating a great story with characters who live beyond the realm of time and place? Does your mind twist and turn with plot scenarios? Do snippets of dialogue play out before your mind, and oh, the setting ideas.  But something keeps holding…

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