Shannon Donnelly Backstory—the background needed to enrich a story—is one of those things that can drive any writer nuts. How much is too much? When do you reveal more? When do you hold back? Too much backstory can sink a story—because you’re not moving the story forward. You’re giving background, and while that can be […]

If you’ve been a reader of WITS for some time, you’ve seen us joke about process envy on a number of occasions. What is it about writers that makes us so convinced someone else has the secret ingredient to the guaranteed-best-seller process? Laura and I were brainstorming a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned […]

Janice Hardy Unless you're incredibly lucky, at some point in your writing life you're bound to fall into a rut. The novel you loved yesterday feels flat today, all your ideas sound "meh" and nothing really excites you about your current manuscript. It happens, and scary as it can be, there are ways to knock […]

 Margie Lawson How often do you get fresh…on the page? Writers are beyond crazy busy getting their story on the page, developing goal-motivation-conflict, deepening characterization, sharing subtext with body language and dialogue cues, making choreography work, as well as covering the 3756 other dynamics they need to consider to make their writing strong. Sometimes writers […]

Plotting for pantsers … The plotters out there are laughing, the pantsers are gasping in horror. Trust me … it can be done! I’m a pantser with suspenders. No matter how many times I try to plot before starting a project, I freeze, can’t do it! My writing process is to tighten the suspenders and […]