Today, we’re going to talk about motivation. Motivation is what keeps you going. Motivation is what keeps you going in the face of adversity. And motivation is what keeps your villains going, too. Motivation can be a powerful thing. There are lots of reasons the villains in our stories do the things they do. Sometimes […]
Movement is a complex topic but excellent practice. To keep a reader engaged, you must keep them turning pages. In other words, you need to ensure that your character — and other characters — move around. Movement could be physical, but it could be an emotional state of mind too. Even if you’ve wrapped up […]
The central conflict is the driving force behind your story. It drives the plot forward, and it acts as a key to understanding what you’re trying to say as the author. You may have seen a version of this table in the past. The conflict is what will drive your story, both for your reader […]
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure what age I started to write down my thoughts, but my first memories go back to my early childhood. I remember writing my first fanfiction when I was about 13, and it involved a girl group based on the Spice Girls—no shame […]
Developing our characters is what we do as writers, but they can also be trouble. Maybe you created a particular character to be so annoying that you never want to see them again. Perhaps they’re so crucial to your story that you can’t even think about killing them. But, what is the best way to […]
Today’s blog goes hand in hand with last week’s post. One of my goals with these guides is to think about different ways to look at story development. You put your characters through the wringer in every way! Despite what some writers may claim, there is no such thing as a “right way” to approach […]
Guilliean reads her creative non-fiction piece of the same name. Stream it and read along with the text! The first time I had a transformative bowl of killer ramen was the day after my first date with my boyfriend. Being American, all I knew was Maruchan. However, my genetic disposition for heart disease put the […]
Every writer has a style, a personality that influences the way they write. Some may be fast and crude, others reserved and timid, and some may be witty. Some may even be all of the above! I took my pursuit of knowledge further and sat for my Masters of Fine Arts in Writing. It’s a […]
Happy Lunar New Year one and all. May the Year of the Tiger bless you and your family this year. In celebration of this event, I’m sharing a review of the books Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco by Judy Yung and A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity […]
The joy of pushing myself to learn how to edit sound bites as part of this one-woman show has me playing around with A.I. again. I wrote this “script” as a one-off extra credit creative writing piece for my Intro to Economics class for undergrad. I polished it up and realized how difficult it is […]