Improve Your Writing

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How to Find the Right Critique Group or Partner for You

Brooke McIntyre of Inked Voices explains what to look for in a critique group and how to find the best writing critique group for you.
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How NOT to Confuse Your Readers

A successful story unfurls in a way that both keeps readers grounded and keeps them guessing—so withhold information, but not context.
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What Improv Comedy Taught Me About Writing Novels

Improv is about being in the moment, and showed one author how to let go, listen better, take risks, and move on when something doesn’t work.
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The Art of Connective Tissue: What Raymond Carver Teaches Us About Building Character and Showing

Small bits of action—descending the stairs, cleaning off the car—might not be insignificant if they tell something about a character’s world.
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When Women Ignore Their Instincts (and Why I Wrote a Novel About It)

One writer explores how women will rationalize away feelings of unease for the sake of pleasing others, and how we express that on the page.
Image: against a dark, stormy sky are silhouetted a woman and a young girl standing in a grassy field and facing each other. The woman holds an umbrella that shelters both of them.

Writing Memoir? The Life You Change the Most Is Yours

A memoirist who began writing with the goal of helping others was surprised by how the process healed old wounds and reframed her self-image.
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The Crucial Ingredient Your Story May Be Missing

If you’re hearing that your story lacks structure or impact, you might be missing the interconnected cohesion of plot, stakes, and character.
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How to Move Your Reader Toward Transformation

This excerpt from Nina Amir’s Change the World One Book at a Time examines how nonfiction authors can best effect change in readers.
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Write Your Book Like You’d Run a Startup

Sharing his work-in-progress has helped one writer build confidence and conviction about who his readers are and what they’re interested in.
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Crafting Cinematic Action by Scene Segmenting

By thinking like a filmmaker—planning your beats, deciding your shots—you create a vivid experience that pulls readers into the story.
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Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Use Stress Responses to Strengthen Your Scenes

Understanding stress responses as learned survival strategies can help you turn every high-stakes scene into character development on the page.
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Please Allow Your Characters Moments of Happiness

When a story barrels from one conflict to the next, hitting pause for a well-placed glimmer of light can benefit both characters and readers.
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Why Your Memoir Feels Like Rambling (and How to Fix It)

Having analyzed over 1000 memoir manuscripts in a 15 year span, Wendy Dale found two linked components of powerful, plot-driven storytelling.
Image: in front of a dilapidated building's chain link fence a woman's hand holds a black and white photo of children standing in the same spot decades earlier.

It’s Not About You: Your Memoir Is Someone Else’s Story

The person on the page can’t be the person writing the book. Because if your life has changed enough to write about, you aren’t that person anymore.
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The Case for Shrinking Your Novel

Even experienced novelists overwrite. Here are five insights about ruthlessly cutting a manuscript—and why that’s a good thing.
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Edit Your Book As If It’s a Screenplay

A writer’s script-editing experience helped fix her novel’s problems with pacing, flat characters, and scenes that didn’t propel the story.
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Crafting Ethical and Moral Dilemmas in Crime Fiction

In crime fiction, the most powerful moments often aren’t about car chases or shootouts—they’re about impossible choices.
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Using the Workplace to Add Depth to Your Novel

Using the workplace as more than a backdrop can supercharge the stakes, conflict, and character development of your fiction.
Image: The view in a car's driver's side rear-view mirror, showing the mountain and winding road that represent the challenging journey the driver's completed.

What I Got Wrong About Memoir and What I Now Understand About the Genre

An author reconsiders her biases, finding the best memoir writing to be courageous, complex, and capable of transforming others and ourselves.
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How Revising My Novel While Querying Helped Me Win a Book Award

When agents suggest further revision, we might need time and distance to see our MS through their eyes—but doing the work can pay dividends.
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What Makes Character Voice Memorable: Emotion

This excerpt from a new craft book by Jordan Rosenfeld explores the many ways our fictional characters manifest their internal emotions.
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Make Good Knots: How Learning to Knit Saved My Novel

Learning to knit renewed one author’s confidence, allowing her to take a risk revising a manuscript that was already out on submission.
Image: collage of screenshots of three book prologues, and a photo of gold type reading "What is past is prologue" painted onto wooden boards mounted into the window of a brick building.

Prologues That Work and Why

Prologues get a bad rap as backstory or info dumps but, done well, they can intrigue readers and ignite interest in the story to come.
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Coach Your Characters: A Life Coach’s Toolkit Offers a New Lens

Life coaches help clients gain insights about how we shape our own life stories, and the same tools can be used to create richer characters.
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What Does It Mean to Have a Compelling Voice in Your Story?

In storytelling, voice can refer to three different elements: character voice, narrative voice, and author voice—and they can often overlap.