You will know if your short story is good or bad if you learn about in media res, feature ambiguity, leave your reader wanting more, have a thematic argument, include plenty of detail, and strive for truthfulness. Once you have finished your story, you might want to consider submitting it to our Letter Review Prize … Read more
To successfully co-write a story you should share your emotions with your co-writer, develop a positive relationship with your writing partner, choose your partner wisely, bring diversity to your team, and be very clear about goals from the outset! This article will explore whether co-writing plays, novels, and screenplays is a good idea, and canvas … Read more
To craft excellent supporting characters make sure you are familiar with the concept of the confident, give your supporting characters good arcs, make the arc supportive of the protagonist’s arc, make them provide what the narrative is missing, explore the theme further with them. Now you will write the best secondaries! The Best Friend / … Read more
So you’re writing a narrative based piece of creative writing, like a novel, play, or screenplay, and you’re beginning to suspect that there might be an underlying formula to this. To understand whether all fiction is formulaic you should develop an understanding of the concept of the sympathetic character, increasingly difficult obstacles, things which are … Read more
Affect and effect are terms that you will hear in relation to creative writing all the time, and they are a bit tricky to get right! Here’s a quick guide to help you make sure you are using them correctly. The difference between affect and effect is easy to master: the most common use of … Read more
Although some stories do not feature a protagonist, or a character who is recongizably the leading character, most do. If the answer is yes, you probably need a protagonist, then the next question is, how do I write a good one? Great stories feature great protagonists right? So how do you write a protagonist that … Read more
If you want to get better at writing as quickly as possible, take a look at the tried and tested strategies that have worked well for so many others! So your writing sucks, and you want to get better. Here are the leading strategies to improve: write what you know, co-write, avoid burnout, develop better … Read more
We’ve all been hit by writer’s block to some degree! Poets, novelists, screenwriters and writers in many other fields have all discussed this condition. You might ask yourself, why can’t I write? You might also be tempted to think, I’m a bad writer. It might show up as rendering you completely unable to write a … Read more
If you’re writing a novel, a short story, a play, or a screenplay you should consider giving your character what they need, and not what they want. So what does this actually mean? In most stories your character will be pursuing a central objective. See this article about how to write central objectives. Your character … Read more
Set the scene! Just how important is setting? And what are the best techniques for writing setting? All this and more is explored below. 1. In the Particular Lies the Universal Have you heard this phrase before? It refers to the slightly odd way in which the more specific a story is, the more people … Read more