Photo by Erin Larson on Unsplash Today’s post is by writer Mirella Stoyanova (@mirellastoyanova). There are a select few life lessons that I am fated to learn the hard way. As a therapist, a trauma survivor, and a consummate people pleaser (not to mention a woman), setting healthy boundaries is one of them.  So I should have known that establishing my own boundaries would be an important part of developing my identity as an emerging writer. Yet, what little I had read about boundaries when it came to writing (Protect your time! Don’t compare yourself to others!) and how much I’v ..read more

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists. Like a genie in a bottle, flashbacks can be wonderful and terrible things. They can grant you phenomenal power—painting in backstory other characters may not know or may be concealing, offering character motivation, raising stakes, creating deeper reader investment, heightening suspense, and more. But, like the genie, if you don’t carefully control them, flashbacks can get disastrously out of hand. If you w ..read more

One of the key pitfalls of backstory, especially early in a novel, is either confusing backstory or overly coy and “mysterious” backstory. Here’s what it looks like. In the enigmatic town of Serenity Falls, nestled deep within the embrace of towering pine forests and shrouded in perpetual mist, secrets were as abundant as the whispers that echoed through the labyrinthine streets. The townspeople moved with an air of quiet reserve, their eyes veiled and their lips sealed, guarding the mysteries that lurked in the shadows of their collective history. Isabella, a newcomer to Serenity Falls, wit ..read more

Podcast host, author, and actor David Temple discusses his shift from being in radio to writing novels, how to navigate author interviews from both sides of the desk, what it takes to make your own book-to-film adaptation, and how he got some of the best known names in thriller writing to appear on his podcast, The Thriller Zone (@thethrillerzone). Having spent his entire career as a broadcast professional, David Temple has hosted top-rated radio shows in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, and on both the Westwood One and Armed Forces Radio Networks. Throughout his caree ..read more

Today’s post is by author Wendy Lyons Sunshine. Just as mountain climbers need a sturdy harness and strong rope to reach the summit, writers depend on robust digital tools to carry us through to a book deadline. For my latest book, I wanted tools that would let me efficiently juggle a great deal of content and citations. The first choice for my toolkit was Zotero, a citation manager that lets you grab information with a single click of a browser extension, conveniently links text, notes, and tags to the citations, and outputs formatted citations with a few clicks. But settling on a word proce ..read more

Photo by Eepeng Cheong on Unsplash Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists beginning on April 10. Backstory tends to fall into two main categories. The first and most ubiquitous kind pervades the story with subtle brushstrokes, filling in texture and depth and color on its characters and world. It is infused throughout almost every line of well-developed story like oxygen—you may never notice it, but it’s essential. The second paves in elements of character or plot background that pl ..read more

Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Wednesday, April 3, for the online class Craft Your Memoir’s Beat Sheet. Most memoirs involve some kind of loss—a breakup, a displacement, a dismantled dream, the death of someone dearly loved. The more painful the event, the more you’ll want to write about it. But as you revise, you’ll discover that some (or many) of your scenes aren’t needed. To figure out what’s important, and how to write about it, you need to identify your memoir’s beats. Beats are part of the Beat Sheet tool Blake Snyder created for his book  ..read more

Photo by Ian Noble on Unsplash Today’s post is by author and editor Lynn Schmeidler (@lynnschmeidler). On New Year’s Day, during my senior year of college, a gruesome double murder took place in my hometown. The couple stabbed to death in their sleep lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, around the corner from my childhood best friend, doors down from where another old friend grew up. Like everyone else in the town, I was shocked and frightened by the news. Although fingerprints were left all over the house, no match for them was found. Time passed but the case remained unsolved. The ..read more

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash Today’s post is by author and book coach Samantha Cameron. Most writers know the importance of portraying underrepresented characters in their work but are anxious when it comes to writing about an identity other than their own. There’s pressure to get it right, and so many ways it can go wrong. If you feel uncertain in any way about representing an underrepresented community in your work, I want you to pause, take a breath, and embrace this anxiety. Wait, you might be thinking, aren’t you supposed to be giving me a pep talk about how this is going ..read more

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash Today’s post is by writer Star Wuerdemann. In 2015, I attended a writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg and had a terrible revelation. As I sat in a room among 75 people diligently scribbling in notebooks, I realized: I had no writer friends. Now, nine years later, I have a solid writing community that continues to grow and support me. Along the way, I had the opportunity to ask Jane Friedman the most important step to take as an early writer. She said, “Build your website.” Then she laughed and admitted that was the pragmatic side; the other most imp ..read more