Every New Year gives you a chance to set new goals. Script Magazine Editor, Jeanne Veillette Bowerman, shares tips for creating writing goals that are realistic in hopes this will be the year that truly elevates your career!
This infographic is courtesy of Jennifer Frost of GrammarCheck. Visit them online at grammarcheck.net or check out the free online grammar checker at grammarcheck.net/editor for proofreading help. Baihley Grandison is the assistant editor of Writer’s Digest and a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter @baihleyg, where she mostly tweets about writing (Team Oxford Comma!), food (HUMMUS FOR PRESIDENT, PEOPLE), and Random Conversations With...
Here's the difference between lay vs. lie, along with "lay lie" examples and a simple chart that breaks it all down and will make it easier for you to know when to use each.
No matter what you are writing, chances are there's a spot for it in our 84st Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition. And now there's even greater incentive to enter as we've upped the ante ...
November is almost here, which means two things: 1) You're going to be seeing a lot of mustaches and 2) it's time to start preparing for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Before November 1 hits, study these key tips on outlining.
As writers who receive piles of rejection letters, it only seems fair that, from time to time, we be given an opportunity to return the favor. There are many books I’d love to reject (here’s my #1 choice), if only for the satisfaction of releasing some pent up frustration and envy....
It's the perfect time to restart your engine and get back into writing. Here, I offer up a 12-day plan of simple writing exercises to help you keep your creative juices flowing without eating up too much of your time. Follow this plan and in less than half a month,...
Too many stories end badly. And yet they somehow get published and even succeed to some degree. That’s because the rest of the story—the structure of it and the compelling essence of the character—triumphs to an extent that the ending doesn’t make or break the story at all. It just is....
The most important thing that you as a biographer can do is to write from the heart. You can take a number of approaches to writing from the heart. For example ...
Just like anyone else who builds things from scratch, writers need tools. And the more you use them, the better you become at using them. The more tools you’re exposed to, the greater your skill. So herein are some tools for you in this matter of creating conflict. Use them to...
Around Thanksgiving I'm always reminded of how thankful I am for my wife, my kids, my family and my friends. One thing that I often overlook is how thankful I am that I am a writer. It's a challenging profession, one that causes a lot of rejection, heartbreak and unintentionally condescending...
Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, there’s not a lot of info out there about...
A few weeks ago, I had never heard of National Novel Writing Month, although I’ve been somewhat lazily writing a book for a year in my free time (Lesson 1: don’t wait for free time). Then one day when I was busily browsing posts on Facebook, I got a notification; someone...
Each person in the audience fights the bull along with the torero, not by following the flight of the cape, but by using another imaginary one that moves differently than the one in the ring. —Federico García Lorca, Poem of the Bull Nearly everyone loves to travel, and many of us...
In a way, most successful writers I know remind me of my house cat Charlotte, says author Peter Brown Hoffmeister. They might be balding or have an average coat of hair. They might not be incredibly good-looking, large or small. They certainly won’t exude sex appeal in a bikini, and they...