How to Bring a Compelling Character to Life
Well-written stories make both the good guys and bad guys compelling characters. They make your world more immersive for your readers and your characters more fun to root for (or against).
Category: Writing
Draft First, Outline Later
My main struggle with following an outline is that if things don’t feel natural when I’m writing, I get an itchy feeling under my fingernails. I can’t force myself to write through something I know isn’t going to work.
The Truth Can Speak For Itself – Guest post by Dave Higgins
Note: This is a guest post contributed at my invitation by Dave Higgins. One of the biggest fears we face, especially when we first share our work, is that our audience (family, friends, readers, co-workers) will find fault with, or even ignore, our work. While this strikes writers of all types, both fiction and non-fiction, […]
The Best and Worst of Critique Comments #2
So we had another full-class critique of short stories. This time, the story had to be 500 words (as opposed to the last story, which was 8-10 pages). After some of the comments I received last time, I figured I’d get another healthy dose of nonsense with the occasional constructive comment. My classmates did not […]
The Best and Worst of Critique Comments
I finally got to present my short story to my fiction class, and the comments I received were worth the wait. (I had food poisoning the day I was scheduled for critique, so I was in limbo for two weeks.) As confident as I am in my writing ability, I was nervous because my classmates […]