Lisa Hall-Wilson   Boo! What better day to write about the body language of fear than the scariest day of the year! Fun Fact: Fear and excitement create the exact same physiological response. What I mean by that is our bodies react the same way to both emotions. The difference between how our bodies respond […]

    Thank you, brave soul, for trusting me with your work. I hope you find this helpful.   I chose this month's submission to help explain a closer POV. This reads like a movie script. It is omniscient POV (mostly), which was great in the 1800's, but today's reader wants an immersive experience...they want […]

Turning Whine Into Goldby Kathryn Craft   Earlier this year I ran across a social media post by Lauren Vaknine that evokes a concern so common among writers I thought we might discuss it here (used with permission): “I watched the film Goodbye Christopher Robin last night, and seeing the adoration [A.A. Milne] got from […]

by Lisa Hall-Wilson Life is hard and as writers, we aren’t doing our jobs unless our characters struggle. Am I right? Good fiction isn’t borne out in the comfortable and easy living we might dream about, but in the tension and conflict between characters and/or their own desires. Giving a character a backstory that includes trauma […]

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy  Unless you're playing with a non-chronological story structure, plot unfolds as time marches on in a novel. It starts when the problem is discovered (more or less), and ends when the problem is resolved. But just because the story is in chronological order, doesn't mean we need to plot it that […]