We have this convention at our house where, whenever someone says something especially hilarious, we write it down on a yellow-sticky and stick it to the refrigerator. As you can see, when you post yellow-stickies of your best dialog on your refrigerator, it eventually becomes a veritable blizzard of yellow-stickies…. Read more“3 Reasons Dialog is Important, 3 Reasons It’s Not”

You know how everyone’s always telling you “Show, Don’t Tell”? Well, that means “Write Scenes, Not Exposition.” So we’re spending three weeks covering the three aspects of scenes: description, action, dialog. Last week we did description. Next week we’ll do dialog. And this week we’re doing action. Action is important… Read more“3 Reasons Action is Important, 3 Reasons It’s Not”

This topic came from @__Deb, and it’s such a good topic that I’m going to extrapolate from it for two more weeks, covering all three aspects of scene: description, action, dialog. “Show, Don’t Tell.” Write scenes, not exposition. Description is important because: Details create the life on the page If… Read more“3 Reasons Description is Important, 3 Reasons It’s Not”

Now, we’ve gotten ourselves into the dark side of fiction—in which we’ve learned who will fail as writers (not us!), how we screw up our manuscripts, and the things we writers always overlook—so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. I mean, the real dirt on writing. I remember the day… Read more“7 Reasons Fiction Needs a Washing Machine”

Luckily for us, even the dark side of writing (even the really dark side) has its light side. How many times have you screwed up your writing? Once? Twice? A hundred times? A thousand times? Counting all the times you’re screwing up this very instant and the times you intend… Read more“8 Lessons to Learn from Screwing Up Your Manuscript”

So now that we’ve taken a good look at the 6 personality types who will fail as writers, let’s turn and face our demons. You know how you work so hard to get that first draft down on the page? How you sacrifice comfort, companionship and casual entertainment, family time,… Read more“5 Things a Writer Always Overlooks”