Gwen Hernandez Hi, everyone! I'm excited to be joining WITS as a regular contributor to discuss the popular writing program, Scrivener. (For more on what Scrivener is and some of my past favorite features, check out this post I did for WITS in 2014.) In November, the Scrivener developers released version 3 for Mac, and the version […]

Piper Bayard It’s December—the month after National Novel Writing Month. We blink our eyes and search around like the lights just came up in the bar. Or maybe our expressions are more like that look a cat gets when a kid puts a paper bag over it for a few minutes and then pops it […]

Tiffany Yates Martin Before we turn the blog over to Tiffany Yates Martin, we want to announce the winners of Chuck Sambuchino's Worst Storyline Ever! contest. Winners: 1. Laurie Michele - "Nudist cowboy rides his faithful horse across the Wild West, fighting crime and saddle rash." 2. Therese Calegari - "Defeated by the love of […]

by Jenny Hansen, @JennyHansenCA Editing and Proofreading: Two separate processes that equal one great story. Like most writers, I hang out with a boatload of other writers. Still, I never saw much of other peoples’ works in progress until I coordinated a contest several years ago. Coordinating contests changed the way I see writing. Period. It was […]

By Sharla Rae One of the things we've discussed in our critique meetings is the tendency all writers have to repeat certain words and phrases. “Echoes” is a term I’ve heard applied to frequently repeated words. Read your chapter out loud, and that’s exactly what they sound like. Common Causes of Echoes: Helpful Echo-Zapping Sites […]