Writing Tips

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Empathy & Character

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Empathy is not agreement. Empathy is “get”-ment. Empathy is a deep understanding of another person’s perspective and/or experience. But empathy does not start with understanding, it starts with a guess. Here, we’re gonna get into how to apply empathy to a character. On Empathy The essential question of empathy is: …

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Addressing Imposter Syndrome

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Let’s start with how awesome it is that we have a term to name the feeling and/or belief that we are not good enough. That term: Imposter Syndrome. Here, we’re gonna get into what it is and explore some ideas on how to address it. Definition Imposter Syndrome is a …

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Content Warnings for Speculative Fiction

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What Are Content Warnings? Content warnings are brief notices that alert readers to potentially distressing material in a story. They’re not censorship, nor are they spoilers — they’re a courtesy that allows readers to make informed choices about what they wish to engage with. In speculative fiction, where themes can …

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First Person POV: How Many Are Too Many “I”s?

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You decide to write your story in first-person and run the text through an application such as ProWritingAid or Grammarly. Or maybe you submit it to a weekly critique session. You receive feedback that you have X number of successive “I” references in your story. You fret: “This is first-person! …

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World Building—One Person’s Approach

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So, you’re writing a novel, and the world differs from the one you live in—by a little or a lot. Maybe the story is about the past or the future, or strange people, economics, or technology. There might be magic in the world, or the setting could be on Pluto. …

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Showdown, Don’t Tell: Keeping a Consistent Narrative Voice

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Fiction writers have a lot of rules. “Show, don’t tell” sits near the top of the rulebook, right up there with point of view (POV), use of said tags, and eliminating adverbs. But sometimes we follow those rules straight into a literary box canyon. So take off your cowboy hat, …

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Tips for Building Worlds

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Worldbuilding can be the most liberating piece of telling stories in speculative fiction, particularly in sci-fi and fantasy. Being unbeholden to the limits of our world allows your characters to have an entirely different set of environmental, cosmic, and cultural settings. It’s an opportunity for you, as the writer, to …

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Creative Writing: What does ‘creative’ mean?

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What we writers do is called ‘creative’ writing. But what is that, really? What do we have to do, to be ‘creative’ in our writing? The definition of ‘creative (adjective)’ is ‘involving original ideas in producing an artistic work.’ So, to be ‘creative’ writers, we must make original ideas. Ideas not heretofore conceived …

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The Six Narrative Perspectives

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As a writer who has been critiqued and often critiques other authors, point-of-view (POV) is a common topic. However, talking about POV is not enough because it is intertwined with the overall narrative perspective of the work. That perspective is a mix-and-match of several concepts that should stay fairly consistent …

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Creating Convincing AI Characters

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You’ve got a brilliant idea for a story about an AI. Time to get writing. You sit at your desk. You boot your laptop. You dismiss those notifications about pending updates. You launch your word processor. You spend five minutes setting the font, paragraph indent, and line spacing. At last, …