Tag: finding your voice

Your life experiences — exhilarating and tedious, mundane and magnificent — should inform your written work. Channel your emotions and use descriptive details to make your story-world come alive.

Not only does keeping a journal of short fiction keep your creative writing muscles working, harvesting your short fiction might lead to your next great idea for a novel.

There’s this cult of the opening sentence, as if crafting a perfect first line is the key to writing a best-selling novel. Here's my take: it isn't.

Publication-quality text is what agents, editors, and readers are looking for — and they can tell whether you have it in the first paragraph, or even the first sentence.

There's no formula for writing a best-selling book, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to dissect best sellers and look for trends and patterns to better understand what these books have in common.

Writing snippets are practical, creative exercises that let you work on specific elements of your writing and explore styles outside your comfort zone.

Tropes — cultural references or recurrent themes imbued with shared meaning — can be a staple of storytelling (and a potential path to cliché).