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Exposition is an important tool that will not only reduce confusion but also make your story more gripping. This may seem counterintuitive, since exposition is notorious for being boring. It will indeed be boring if you overuse it, as many writers do. Skilled used of … read more »
I got a request for Maximum Ride, so here we are with The Angel Experiment, the first book in this bestselling series by James Patterson. By the title and the cover, we can assume the main character is an angelic young white woman. The chapters … read more »
Sometimes writers just want a simple answer to a technical question, but everyone is telling them different things. Not only that, but many people will assure them that if they get it wrong, they’ll be humiliated once they send their work to an agent or … read more »
In the land between writer and reader, there lies the copy editor. But what is a copy editor? What do they do? For that matter, what do they not do? That’s our topic for this week, and with at least one copy editor on the … read more »
Melodramatic writing is a common mistake for writers. Most of us want our stories to have emotional impact, but if we don’t understand how that’s accomplished on a technical level, it’s easy to end up with purple prose instead. Let’s have a look at what … read more »
Many writers hope to create the immersive experiences they watch on a screen. Ironically, delivering the most immersive experience in writing depends on learning techniques that don’t exist in film. The narrative style writers need for this is close perspective. Read more »
This post-apocalyptic YA novel by James Dashner spawned not only bestselling sequels but also a movie series. A bad movie series, I hear, but they star Dylan O’Brien (aka Styles), so how bad could they be? I think the cover art is gorgeous, but I’m … read more »
For a lot of people, “adverbs” mean all those pesky words ending in “-ly” that tell rather than show, but it turns out there’s more. A lot more. Would you believe it if we told you that a huge junk of our words are in fact adverbs, maybe even a majority of them? Read more »
When we do a content edit, we focus on the big-picture stuff first. There’s no point in nitpicking small things that might be rewritten anyway. However, we do run into lots of problems at the wordcraft level. To help everyone improve their prose, let’s go … read more »
Since we’re lucky enough to have Ariel in the studio once again, we’ve decided to take a deep dive into common wordcraft mistakes. There’s no plot or character analysis here, just the words and punctuation on the page. Mostly, it’s how those words and punctuation … read more »