Have you ever felt your writing is flat, despite how many beautiful words you use? You might be overusing adjectives and adverbs. Luckily, there is an easy fix—use vivid verbs instead.
Although you might instinctively think adjectives will improve your description, strong verbs actually do a better job at electrifying your creative writing.
In this post, you can learn a two-step process to improve your writing skills, and start implementing these tips with a little help from a list of vivid verbs.
You sit down, ready to write, and you’re excited because this scene is going to be full of terrific action-packed conflict to grab your reader. But then you wonder, do you even know how to write action scenes?
Are plot points and blow-by-blow action really what keeps readers turning pages? Do you know how to write the kind of action that will add suspense to the story, rev your readers’ heart rate, and leave them dying to know what happens next?
Creating an action scene that works on screen is difficult. Creating an action scene that works on the page might be an even steeper challenge!
Luckily, there are writing strategies to help you write an action scene with skill.
How do you overcome creative resistance? How do you handle that big, blank screen staring at you from your computer? The cursor just blink-blink-blinking its mockery.
When it comes to your writing time, do you avoid it? Choose to read celebrity gossip online, or maybe wander over to your empty refrigerator multiple times? Have you ever written one paragraph but think it sucks, so you delete it? And instead of writing more, stew in self-loathing.
Whatever your creative challenges are on and off the page, you’re not lame or a loser. There’s actually a scientific reason behind your creative resistance.
The even better news is you can change your writing progress so it is progress.
There are heroes everywhere. A great Hero’s Journey can take place in any genre. But did you know there are eight hero’s journey archetypes that work especially well for a universal protagonist?
Your reader will unconsciously expect your story to have certain characters. If you want your next heroic story to be a success, you’d be wise to plan the entire journey around these key characters. Or at the very least, with them.
Without these hero’s journey archetypes, you might have a story that fails to “work,” and this will leave the reader dissatisfied and confused.
To avoid this, let’s go over who these character archetypes are, and why they will push your hero on their journey.
Have you ever heard what people tell kids who want to play sports? Practice. Did you grow up with music lessons? You’ve probably heard the same thing. Keep practicing.
But can you apply the same philosophy to writing?
Not only is practicing writing a good way to improve your writing skills—it’s essential to becoming a better writer.
And like all honed skills, you need a good teacher or guide to push you—to help you practice. In this post, you’ll not only learn four steps to help you practice, but exercises to improve your writing skills along the way.
Italics, quotation marks, underlines, plain old capital letters—when it comes to writing titles, the rules can feel like a confusing mess. Do you italicize book titles? What about movie titles? And for goodness’ sake, what should you do with pesky things like TV shows, short stories, or Youtube videos?
With so many different kinds of media, it’s easy to get lost in all the rules. Let’s demystify them, shall we?
You might think you don’t need to do much research because you’re writing fiction. (Isn’t fiction just making stuff up?!) You’d be wrong.
Your readers expect to be transported to your setting and to understand your characters so fully, they seem like real people. Little things like using the wrong jargon or having your main character wear the wrong type of bodice can jar your reader out of the story and cause them to lose respect for you as a writer. If they can’t trust you to get the facts right, why should they trust you to guide them through a story?
Like it or not, research is a writer’s best friend. (Next to caffeine, anyway.) So let’s talk about how to conduct research for a book.
As a writer of fiction, you want readers to open your book and become so absorbed they can’t put it down. It helps to be aware that so much of what happens when a reader picks up a book takes place in the subconscious mind. Readers don’t realize that it’s happening,...
Here’s a question for you: what’s the plural of fish?
English is a pretty convoluted language. Even when things seem straightforward, exceptions pop up to turn regular rules upside down.
Today we’ll look closely at the word fish and verify the correct plural use of it.
Whether or not you’re writing a rhyming children’s book like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish or a literary novel staged on the sea, understanding the proper use of this word—like all good grammar—can strengthen you’re writing.
Learn good grammar without depending on tools like Grammarly with bite-sized posts on simple grammar rules like this one.
At one point in your writer’s life, you’ve probably come across the term Hero’s Journey. Maybe you’ve even studied this guide for storytelling and applied it to your own books—and yet, something about your own application felt off. You wanted to learn more, but didn’t know where to start.
You needed a resource that would simplify the hero’s journey steps and all the other major details instead of complicate them.
You needed this post.
The Hero’s Journey is as old as humanity itself. And over the history of humanity, this single story form has emerged over and over again. People from all cultures have seemed to favor its structure, and its familiar types of characters, symbols, relationships, and steps.
If you want to build or strengthen your writing career and win a following of many happy readers, you want this particular tool in your writer’s toolbox.
