NaNoWriMo, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, is National Novel Writing Month, where hundreds of thousands of writers gather to bang out as many words as they can in the month of November. Many writers skip it and many writers treat it as a yearly pilgrimage to Writing Mecca. NaNoWriMo is my […]

  From our earliest moments, most writers are avid readers. We devour books — for story, for craft, for new worlds and new ideas. I don’t know if we become students of the written word because we love to read or if we read because we were born to love the written word. All that […]

  Though we are a very cohesive group here at Writers in the Storm, we are split down the middle in writing style. Laura and Fae write their stories in a linear fashion while Julie and I quilt ours together scene by scene. The linear approach kills my stories, but story quilting lets me focus on my […]

I first learned about Golden Lines the summer I attended the UCI Summer Writing Institute. After a particularly dense morning lecture, we were told to extract the golden lines, the ideas that we could use to improve our writing. Every year after the RWA Conference, I like to share the Golden Lines I've highlighted from […]

  Most novels are written on the premise of "what if." Our What-if muscles help us figure out what needs to come next in the story. Sometimes we're lucky and we just know. More often (at least for me) we often have no clue what needs to happen next. When I write non-fiction for awhile, […]