WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

No matter what genre you write or who your audience is, one thing is certain:

Everyone experiences fear.

It shapes how people think, the choices they make, and influences how they live their lives. Tapping into a character’s fear is a powerful way to draw readers in because they can’t help but be remi...

Generating ideas is the most underrated skill in a novelist’s toolkit—more essential than an appetite for cold-blooded revision, a head for structure, or a gift for dialogue. Generating more story possibilities within a single manuscript separates a competent draft from a novel with depth, complexity, and staying power.

So how do you come up with more ideas? Fo...

When a character suffers emotional pain, the brain’s response is to stop the discomfort, and often this results in a coping mechanism being deployed. Whether it’s an automatic response or a learned go-to st...

As a Book Coach and developmental editor, I work on hundreds of books with writers each year, in full or in part. I give feedback on drafts, debuts, and nearly polished manuscripts written by writers tackling their third, fourth, or even tenth book. Because I follow the journeys of so many writers, I’m in a unique position to share some universal truths I see over and ov...

With no shortage of things that can trigger a character’s fear, learning how to show it becomes just as important to writers as plotting, character-building, and crafting a realistic story world.

Here’s the good news: Fear kickstarts an automatic survival response that affects a character’s behaviour, perceptions, thoughts, choices, and more. With so many cues...