Category: Pen to Paper
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Hiding in Their Shadow
How can you use a role model in your story? Can you? Won’t it seem obvious and boring to have your main character constantly looking up to another? Simple answer? Yes. Your character is supposed to be ‘cool’ in some way, and if your story is a montage of your main character asking his parents…
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Memorized by the Majesty
If you could describe the ocean in one word, how would you do it? Beautiful? Powerful? Huge? Even if you’ve never been to the ocean before and seen it’s majesty, pictures alone can impact the way you view it. For instance, a picture of a pretty sunset stretched out over the water’s horizon might make…
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Why the ‘Where’ Matters
How important is the setting to a story? For instance, if you wrote a tale about two characters solving a crime, but you left out every detail about the setting. How long do you think it would take you to figure out that the story takes place in Nowhere Land? Well, it would probably depend…
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Setting the Sea-nery
Have you ever visited a place and thought, “This would be the perfect place to use in my newest book!” Whether it’s a pretty scenery, particular scent, or peaceful atmosphere, some aspects of our everyday life might be ideal to use when creating fictional places of our own. After all, it’s much easier to write…
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Help! Writing a Novel Takes Too Long!!
WRONG! Procrastinating takes too long. Pausing and rewriting your story every time you get a line or even a paragraph done is time consuming. Not only that though, editing as you write wastes time. Don’t believe me? Think about it. Say you start writing a novel one Friday morning. You sprint and write several thousand…
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What Happens Next?!
Mysteries are fun. Whether you prefer a nice cozy mystery where there’s more kissing than crime or a more solid mystery where there’s murder at stake, and the main character is the only one who can solve the problem and save the day, mysteries can be an enjoyable genre to read it. However, while reading…
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But They Don’t Like It! (Part 2)
Want to know what the biggest secret for dealing with people who don’t like your writing is? Ready? THE ANSWER ISSSSSSSSS: Eat cupcakes and mope around, thinking about how terrible your writing is! Amazing answer, right?! Yeah, yeah, that didn’t come out as funny as I was hoping, but that’s what I get for trying…
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But They Don’t Like It! (Part 1)
Feedback is VERY important. Often, we can’t see our mistakes in our own work, but anyone else reading through our writing can. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve edited the same chapter several times, and I’ve edited out ALL of the mistakes, only to have a friend read the chapter and find seven…
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It’s What the Fans Wanted!
Doing the right thing in real life is sometimes hard, but sometimes when you’re writing it can be even harder. Now what do I mean? Let’s take Jimmy again, (Because why not,) and imagine that he’s in the middle of writing his mystery novel and disappearing penguins and his main character is a little, runt-of-the-litter…