How to Empower Your Writing With a Brilliant Epigraph

How to Empower Your Writing With a Brilliant Epigraph

The epigraph is simply a well-chosen quotation, set at the beginning of a text. Epigraphs can open essays, books, chapters of a book, or even each story in a book—any writing, really, which suggests its theme.

They can, however, do so much more.

After a short primer, just to get us on the same page with a working understanding of the epigraph, and a little confessional angst, you will have a couple of practice challenges to engage your new friends.

Character Voice: How to Actually Listen to Your Protagonist

Character Voice: How to Actually Listen to Your Protagonist

Anyone who has dipped their toes into the world of writing novels knows how crucial character development is to telling strong stories. Plot, setting, and dialogue are necessary building blocks of fiction, but your characters are the foundation that your story is resting on—without dynamic characters, no amount of plot twists, fantastical settings, or authentic dialogue will magically transform into a novel that people want to read.

If the success of your novel is in fact riding on the strength of your characters, you need to know who they are, inside and out. More importantly, you need a character with a strong voice, one that can reveal the emotional depths of your story to the reader.

What’s Really Keeping You from Writing?

What’s Really Keeping You from Writing?

I consider myself a writer. But there are a lot of days on which I don’t write anything more than a post on Facebook. Then there are days where I spend hours pecking away at the keyboard. But overall, I would love to write more, not less.

We all know some writers who are really disciplined. For example, Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day every day without fail. Why can’t I do this? What’s keeping me from writing? What’s keeping you from writing more?

2 Ways to Beat Writing Procrastination and Finish Your WIP

2 Ways to Beat Writing Procrastination and Finish Your WIP

We hear voices in our heads in the middle of the night. We see scenes in our minds like movies and are compelled to capture them on the page. We look around at the world and notice things, things other people might not see. Writing procrastination—well, that’s just not in our vocabulary.

We are lovers of stories. We gasp at expertly crafted sentences. We smile at innovative turns of phrase. We’re left breathless at the fierce beauty of a story well told.

We are writers. And writers write, right?

Well…