[This blog post is a collaboration between two of our members, and a great job they did! Nancy Kuykendall and Eileen Moynihan were in class when I was talking about writing book reviews. They graciously accepted the challenge to collaborate and write a blog post about that very thing. Enjoy
Many professional authors will advise that we should “Write what you know.” It is important for authenticity and grounding readers in our stories. It also helps us to stick to information, situations, and locations that are familiar. Writing only what I know can be a huge challenge for me. I
In college earning my Master’s, I took a class on statistics. I’m not a “numbers” kind of person, or so I thought, until I took this class. I realized just how much numbers can tell a person about almost any subject. I also learned that randomness is rarely achieved even
Writing a fight scene is easy to get wrong. It’s also easy to get right. This blog post is adapted from a classic article I wrote in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine back in October of 2006. That’s a long time ago, so I thought it was worth updating and
The invitation came out of the blue. Would I like to write a magazine article on a person with a very interesting mission? I puzzled a bit—I’d never written for this magazine or on this topic before. However, I have written for a variety of magazines and also edited a
Writers live in this 2-dimensional world struggling to make it (along with their reader’s excellent imagination) a living, breathing world of 4-dimensions. Real. Sometimes we hit the mark and other times not. [This article is directed toward the less experienced writer. I’d really like for the more veteran writers to offer guidance to Sprout Writers in the comments section. I love seeing how words create new worlds and environments with “real” people.]
There is one obstacle that will bite us every time and that is communication among characters. Dialogue is crucial, but that is only part of communicating. Body language and tonal qualities make up the majority of communication.
Sign up for a FREE 30 minute video consult with Tom Blubaugh, Readership Building Coach