The Secret to Deeply Understanding Your Story — You might say, sure I do, I’m writing it. It’s about a woman who rents a house on the beach and falls in love with the lonely neighbor. Or it’s about a cop who solves a cold case murder after unknowingly befriending the murderer. Or . . . whatever your…

Use Real Relevant Details to Help Your Reader, Not Confuse Them — Details in stories should 100% be used as much as possible. Even in non-fiction, details help to clarify meaning and eliminate confusion. Details can range from descriptions of a coffee cup a character uses or eye color to real facts. And it’s these facts I’d like to write about today…

Exercise Your Creative Muscles — Don’t you wish you could flip a switch or turn a dial and increase your creativity? Boy, I do, especially on those days when I’m tired or not motivated to write. But here’s the problem . . . we’ve been conditioned or brainwashed into thinking that creativity IS something we…

Write Sad Scenes That Are Emotional But Not Overly-Sentimental — Since our job as novelists is to make life difficult for our characters, we may need to write a scene where our characters are grieving for someone they love and lost or possibly grieving the loss of a dream or opportunity. How do writers write about grief effectively? What can…

Rather, It Can Remind Us That We Should Be Happy — My best friend just died. She’d been fighting cancer for over a year, so even though we all hoped she would win the battle and survive this horrible disease, we knew the odds. Still, she decided to go through treatment which is as bad or worse than the disease. We…

Search Your Passions — It’s Where All Your Ideas Are Hiding — A common question that probably all writers get is: where do you get your ideas? Most of the time, my answer is how to I stop the ideas and focus on just one. Writers tend to see ideas everywhere, but they’re not all good ideas. Some can make great stories…

And Why Those Stories Should Not Be About You — People love to write about their own experiences. Journals, personal essays, memoirs and even poetry are popular because they emerge from the writer’s life, and therefore, seem easier to write. This isn’t always true, but it is true that we have more content to pull from if we are writing…

My Recommendations for You — It’s summer! If you’re in the northern hemisphere, you’re probably thinking, no kidding. It’s ridiculously hot, I know it’s summer! This means that you probably prefer to enjoy indoor activities where you can stay cool. The best thing to do, in my opinion as a writer and booklover, is to…

My Challenge with an Unreliable Narrator — When your narrator can’t be trusted, when he thinks of himself as one way, but proves to be the opposite, it’s a challenge and a puzzle for the writer. In a way, it’s fun to create scenes that build distrust and a growing realization that the character is not who…