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Names, and How to Spell Them Correctly
Learn how lists can help you get your characters’ names right, and discover simple ways to type accents.
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Giving Your Readers Space
Intimidated by a long block of text? You’re not alone. This post will help you avoid long paragraphs in your writing. Need to cut some words out? Keep an eye out for where you’ve repeated yourself. You just might’ve heard that a big part of writing is deciding which words to use. However, this isn’t…
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Tailbone Features: Essential Parts of Early Drafts
Struggling with confidence while writing your first draft? Read on to learn how the issues you’re creating are essential. Want some solidarity? Click below to read one of my first drafts. Floppy disks were obsolete two decades ago. However, you can often click an image like the one below to save your work. I like…
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Are Your Characters in the Right Place at the Right Time Too Often?
Does your plot hinge on your protagonist just happening to overhear a conversation? Read on and find out why this can be a problem. Click below for some ideas to make life complicated for your characters. Convenience is rather nice in real life. However, it can cause issues in fiction. If your main character learns…
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How to Persuade Your Characters to Make an Unwelcome Choice
Discover how some underhanded tactics can push your characters in a bad direction. The stakes in this post (appear to) affect only the individual. But what about when others are directly involved? Early in 2023, I tried an experiment. I wrote a short piece of fiction and made it accessible from my homepage. However, I…
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Making Sure Your Meaning’s Clear
Earlier this year, my wife and I took our two-year-old son to see Hey Duggee Live at the theatre. While we were taking our seats, I nodded towards the stage and said, ‘Duggee’s going to be up there in a minute!’ When the show started and the cast appeared, my son pointed towards the ceiling…
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Showing Rather Than Stating Emotions
I’m going to tell you a happy story! Really happy. I’m so pleased with how things are going, and my happiness is palpable. Don’t you feel happy reading that? No? Hmmm, maybe it’s not so palpable after all… You’ve heard the advice that you should show rather than tell. That’s not always true (see one…
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Giving Your Characters Hard Choices
How many “good” characters do you have in your book? People who want to do the right thing, and who’d say they don’t try to hurt others. Pick someone important, either a protagonist or an important secondary character if your main character’s happily evil. Let’s see if their actions back up their words! Imagine them…
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Characters as Quiz Contestants
If you’ve come up with your own fantasy world, you might have created a rich backstory for it as well, complete with a list of rulers stretching back decades (or centuries, or more!). Doing so can be a fun exercise, but it’s important to think about how much of this history your characters would know.…
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Learning from Our Past Writing
I was looking through some old folders this week, and I came across a short story I wrote in 2004. It was simply entitled My First Attempt At A Short Story (I didn’t know about capitalisation rules for title case at the time). I remember writing it, and I thought it was pretty great at…