Fiction manuscripts tend to be huge documents. When you’re editing such a large text, it can be helpful to get an overview of how that text is currently structured. You can do that with a list of your chapter word counts. Among other things, this list of chapter...
Novels are big beautiful things, but the Word documents that hold them can be a nightmare to navigate. Fiction manuscripts are typically between 70,000 and 100,000 words long. That’s a lot of words to wade through as you edit your story. The mere act of searching...
I am very excited this week to share a blog post on the ALLi blog! The post is all about what authors can learn from professional editors in their own self-editing practice. Some of the information in that article is so important for authors to know that I’d also...
As writers, we don’t just use words to state facts but to make our readers feel our characters’ experiences. We want our writing to be evocative and immersive. In other words, we want our prose to sound pretty. How exactly, though, do we achieve well-crafted prose?...
As writers, we don’t just use words to state facts but to make our readers feel our characters’ experiences. We want our writing to be evocative and immersive. In other words, we want our prose to sound pretty. How exactly, though, do we achieve well-crafted prose?...
The stories we tell have power. We tell stories to impart knowledge—to show each other how the world works, what dangers to be wary of, and what moral convictions to stand firm in. Stories are not just fluffy entertainment to pass the time. They are modes of...
Names, as the symbols that represent our identity, are both arbitrary and incredibly meaningful at the same time. When writing my own characters, I love finding the perfect name that not only sounds good but also has an underlying meaning that reflects something...
In my last post, I covered the four pillars of plot. If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you give it a read before continuing on with this post. Here, I’ll show you how you can use those four pillars to plot your story’s three acts. Before we start, keep...
There is a concept floating around the writing community that I think is a bit problematic. It’s the idea that you’re either a pantser or a planner. You either outline every event in detail before you start writing or you fly by the seat of your pants and improvise...