Writing Tips

Some writing mistakes will make you look like an amateur, even if you’re an experienced writer — but there are ways to avoid them.

This list of YouTube channels for writers serves as must-see TV for independent authors of all stripes, genres, and experience levels.

In your attempt to create characters your readers crave, these five steps can help you get to know and understand your players well enough to write living, breathing three-dimensional characters on the page.

Would you like to be much more productive as a writer? It’s possible, and you don’t have to turn into a machine or ingest huge amounts of caffeine to do it. (Although a bit of coffee might help goose your enthusiasm.) If you’re like me, you wouldn’t mind increasing your writing output so you can get more books and information products to market. This aspiration naturally leads to the question, “How much content can I reasonably expect to produce?” The best way to quantify it is to find out how many words you actually crank out per hour.

According to the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut, the shapes of stories can be graphed. Have you thought about the shape of your short story?

A great way to transmit interesting ideas is through the contrast of two very different things, i.e. a juxtaposition. Contrast is one of the most powerful elements in storytelling and works just as well in a single sentence.

A great villain can engage an audience, energize a book, and provide a satisfying source of conflict — but the devil is definitely in the details.