I’m Back to Writing It’s been a while, but I’m back to writing again. I’ve been away for a while, due to a few things in my personal life. I’m a chronic illness girl, unfortunately, and my health has been pretty bad the last few months. I’ve not been able to work on things I…
Category: Writing Tips and Advice
Writing tips and advice
Antagonists: The Bad Guy?
Antagonists: Always the Villain? On Monday we talked about the protagonist of the story. Today we look at their opposition, the antagonist. Villains are always antagonists, but not every antagonist is a villain. Essentially the antagonist is the one who is working against your protagonist and getting in their way. The antagonist does not need…
Protagonist: I Need A Hero!
What is a ‘protagonist’? The main character is called the protagonist. This is the main focus of the story, it is their journey we are reading about. We learn the most about the protagonist, and we witness their development as they navigate the plot. You can have more than one protagonist, of course, that’s perfectly…
Character Relationships: No Man Is An Island
Character Relationships Let’s talk about character relationships. As the quote in the title says: ‘No man is an island.’ What does that mean? Every single person has some kind of relationship that connects them to other people. Even a hermit living in a cave in the middle of nowhere will have relatives or something somewhere…
Personality Traits: Getting To Know Your Characters
Personality Traits Every character is a person (even if they’re not human!) and that means they have a personality that is uniquely theirs. Just like in real life, everyone has a handful of personality traits that dictate how they behave, how they speak and how they react to situations. For your main and supporting characters,…
Character Backgrounds: Skeletons in the Closet
Character Backgrounds This week, I would like to talk about character development. As an author, you should know your characters inside out, everything about them and all the skeletons in their closet. The best way to write genuine, believable characters is to make sure you know them inside out. For today, we’re going to look…
Punctuating and Formatting Dialogue
How To Format Dialogue You’ll remember that before we talked about breaking the rules of grammar within dialogue. That’s totally okay to do but when it comes to how we format and punctuate the dialogue itself within the text, there are important rules that must be followed. This is essential for making sure your dialogue…
Essentials of Writing Dialogue
When you’re writing fiction, dialogue is an essential part of it. It is also an area that a lot of writers will struggle with. Often the dialogue is written too correctly, or there’s just simply too much of it. Writers can be prone to excessive adjectives, trying to avoid using ‘said’ too much and overcompensating….
Seven Writing Myths Discussed
There’s always someone telling you how you should write, that you must follow these steps and this routine to succeed as a writer. Then you find other people who tell you that these rules are utter nonsense. It can be difficult to know who to believe. As with any creative pursuit, writing has lots of…
Understanding Verbs Part 3
Part 3 Of Understanding Verbs In the first part we discussed verbs, what they are and the different kinds of verbs you might come across. In part 2 we covered the different tenses and forms of verbs., In this part we are going to cover the use of verbs within the sentence. Subject-verb agreement is…