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 […]

by Margie Lawson I confess. I’m in love with the way some authors slip in backstory. I’m not talking chunks of backstory that sit on your page like cement blocks. The kind of blah blah blah that invites readers to skim. I’m talking about little hits of backstory. Those smooth keep-your-story-moving backstory slip-ins. What is […]

Lisa Hall-Wilson   You don’t know what you don’t know, right? That’s part of what makes writing in deep point of view so hard. I have spent years studying this technique and continue to learn more about it. But if you had a place to start maybe you could get started on your own. But […]

Eldred Bird Good stories are built around great characters. If readers don’t identify or sympathize with your protagonist, they’re not going to care enough to come on your character’s journey. We writers generally have a picture in mind when it comes to the characters in our books. We know what our heroes and villains look […]

Tiffany Yates Martin   I had a blog post all queued up for this week, but I’m on a plane back from the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ annual Colorado Gold conference and can’t stop thinking about the weekend and what it made me realize about this business—and the authors who are the soul of it. […]