Imitating the Masters: How to Use Setting to Test Your Character’s Voice
Practicing this type of imitation is useful because displacing characters and putting them in new settings and situations helps clarify how character voice affects a story as much as (or more than) plot.
Imitating the Masters: How to Develop Character and Tone Through Imitation
Writing imitations of work that you admire is a great way to stretch your writing skills and improve your mastery of writing techniques. Here's an example of how it's done using Tana French's In the Woods.
Writing Exercise: 3 Reasons to Write Imitations of Your Favorite Authors
Many artists have encountered the advice to "imitate the masters." Aspiring composers generally study, practice and perform pieces by others before attempting to write their own concertos, for example, and visual artists often attempt to recreate museum pieces in their own sketchbooks. This practice of imitation makes a great writing exercise...
An Idea a Day: August 2014
Generating good, usable ideas can be difficult for any writer, new or established. While John Steinbeck may have been exempt (he famously compared ideas to rabbits, saying “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”), we are not all on Steinbeck’s level....
Writing Gender-Specific Dialogue
Writing dialogue to suit the gender of your characters is important in any genre, but it becomes even more essential in romance writing. In a romance novel, characters of opposite sexes are often paired up or pitted against each other in relationships with varying degrees of complication. Achieving differentiation in the...
Stimulate Your Mind With These Writing Exercises!
If you’re looking for ways to get out of your writing funk or challenge yourself, we have more writing exercises for you from Your First Novel by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb. Leave a comment below letting us know what works best for you! First Lines. Take a stack of novels...
4 Left-Brain Exercises to Jumpstart Your Writing
As writers, we’re constantly on the hunt for new ideas but sometimes we may not be looking in the right places or simply need to refresh our writing routine. If you are looking for writing inspiration, read this excerpt from Your First Novel and find new ways to challenge yourself and...
A Writing Exercise For Engaging Your Readers
Take the first chapter of your novel, or a short story that you’re working on, and rewrite it twice. First, rework it in an effort to engage a family member, like a parent. Second, rework it to engage a friend, a coworker, or anyone else you feel could be your reader....
Writing a Romance Novel? Try this Exercise & Develop Your Characters
If you want to write a successful story, you’ll need to know who your characters are including their personalities, goals, and desires. To help you better understand your characters, read Eric Maisel’s book, What Would Your Character Do? Inside you’ll find 30 situations into which you can drop your characters to...
Writing the Book You Were Meant to Write
Today’s tip of the day comes from Setting and Keeping Goals, a chapter in Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt. Here she discusses how to write the book you were meant to write. If you are aware ahead of time that you may be working on a story that...
Not-So-Anonymous Commenter
You’ve been writing a blog for a number of months now without issue, then suddenly you’re confronted with an anonymous commenter who posts unwarranted slams against you. A techie friend helps you use the commenter’s IP address to get the address of this rogue. You head to the house ready to...
How to Overcome Writer’s Block Like a Bestselling Author
Writers everywhere have or will lack writing inspiration. Whether you need help to overcome writer’s block, or are simply looking for inspiration for writing, read our today’s tip, taken from Write Great Fiction: Revision and Self-Editing by James Scott Bell. We all have times in our writing when the words get...
Creating Characters: 4 Simple Exercises
Here are 4 simple exercises to help you invent characters for your fiction.
by Nancy Kress
by Nancy Kress