A key part of revising a book is making the tough cuts. You might be an overwriter who needs to trim the fat from their story or drop your word count down by putting your crutch words in the line of the Delete key's fire, or you may need to scrap a scene that doesn't serve your story. One of the hardest I've faced as a writer is cutting characters. I've had to do it a handful of times and MAN do I agonize over it. Characters are often the first thing I know about a new story

Using "said" in your writing isn't a sin. As for "said is dead," it's a guideline that's often misinterpreted as a hard and fast rule.

2024 seems to be flying by! And so far, this year is vastly different from how things were around this time 2023. In these past few months, I started at a new job that I love, launched Plot Bunny Hollow , and made some new writer friends that have inspired me and kept me motivated. I'm also in significantly better health now that the majority of my lingering long Covid symptoms have at last subsided. On the whole, things really feel like they're starting to look up. That mean

Author's Note: If you'd like to skip the background for this post and jump right into the resources, click HERE . Writing a book is one of those things that may sound easy until you get into the thick of it. It's just making it up as you go, and then making it sound coherent, right? I'll be the first to admit to my own adolescent naivety when I started the first draft of my scrapped-for-now first effort at writing a novel. In the nearly fifteen years since then, I've only jus

via IGN Like many gamers out there, I have a soft spot for The Last of Us . It's a game I've referenced several times here on the blog, even dedicating an entire post to the giraffe scene — and with good reason. Its storytelling is masterful and its characters are so compelling. It's hard not to fall in love with Joel and Ellie and become invested in their surrogate father-daughter relationship as they travel cross-country amid a zombie-ruled wasteland with the fate of the wo

Unless you've got friends like Harper Lee's who are in a position to pool together a Christmas gift of one year's salary so you can write the book of your heart and dreams, chances are that as a budding writer just starting out on the journey, you've got a day job. And to be honest, even writers who are published may still work a day job or have another form of income apart from their books. Writing is seldom a lucrative business to be in even with advances and royalties (sh