by Tiffany Yates Martin

Thirty years ago, when I started in this business, having a writer directly hire a freelance editor like me was a relative rarity. With few exceptions you got an editor when you got a publisher—full stop.

But the explosion of indie and small-press publishing has seen a similar explosion in the services available for authors—which has also come with a roster of myths, hype, and confusion.… Read the post

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Regardless of what POV you’re writing in, allowing readers to understand what’s going on inside your character is what makes a story immediate, direct, and vivid to us. If we don’t know how they react to things and how they process them, your characters might as well be game pieces we simply watch progress along the board.… Read the post

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Two commonly misinterpreted canons of story can make rampantly using flashbacks in your story deceptively seductive: “Backstory is the story” and “Show, don’t tell.” Flashback seems to fit the bill perfectly, doesn’t it? Dramatizing your main characters’ past in a “real-time” scene from it surely handily addresses both issues.… Read the post

by Tiffany Yates Martin

There's a common fallacy of human thinking that you may be as guilty of as I sometimes am.

“He's a jackass….” “That woman is nothing but a gossip.” “I'm such a scatterbrain!”

In cognitive behavioral therapy this is called labeling and mislabeling, reducing a person to a single behavior, and it can become an automatic thought pattern.… Read the post

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Writing is a career where it can feel that there are so many outside forces standing between you and your goals: work or home commitments that may keep us from your writing time; the agents or publishers who stand at the gates of career “success”; the booksellers or reviewers we need to help us reach readers.… Read the post