Writing Tips

The protagonist is running for her life. The world is collapsing. The villain has won. And the reader shrugs. Danger and emotional stakes aren’t the same thing. Plot jeopardy comes free with genre—any thriller has danger, obstacles, conflict. What your reader needs before any of that matters is emotional stakes: what is the protagonist’s deepest…

Most writers treat short stories like compressed novels. The form has a single job: show one moment of irreversible change. A novel carries multiple characters, intersecting problems, a web of subplots. A short story can’t. The only territory is one crack in a life, and what fell through. The student stories that don’t work share…

First-person present tense is the most seductive mistake in contemporary fiction. Writers discover it in published YA or literary novels and try it themselves. The logic seems sound: “I run down the hallway” feels more immediate than “I ran down the hallway.” More urgent. More cinematic. What gets lost is narrative distance. Distance is a…

Every dialogue tag does one job: identify the speaker. An action beat does everything else. “I’m fine,” she said. Reader hears the words.She poured the coffee without looking at him. “I’m fine.” Reader sees the lie. The action creates a second layer on top of the words. What a character does while talking reveals what…

Most setting descriptions read like the writer paused the story to file a property report. “The room was large, with high ceilings and antique furniture.” We’ve all written it. It tells the reader nothing about the character experiencing it. The fix: filter every detail through your POV character’s emotional state. Whatever she notices should be…

Most writers spend months building their protagonist and fifteen minutes on everyone else. That imbalance shows on the page. The best secondary characters aren’t helpers. They’re mirrors, foils, and pressure points. They embody beliefs your protagonist holds but can’t say out loud—or beliefs your protagonist refuses to acknowledge. Think of Samwise in Lord of the…

Most writers describe what a room looks like. Readers remember what it smelled like. Sight is the default because we’re visual creatures. We write the oak desk, the afternoon light, the stack of papers. But smell reaches the emotional brain before the analytical one. Sound works the same way. Taste can detonate an entire era…

Most writers connect their scenes with “and then.” That’s how you get a plot summary, not a story. Every scene should connect to the next with either “but” or “therefore.” “But” means complication: the character tries something, and it fails, or something unexpected blocks the path. “Therefore” means consequence: because this happened, that follows. When…

Most character arcs fail the same way. The character has a goal, they achieve it (or don’t), and nothing feels earned. The problem is confusing want with need. Want is conscious—the thing they’re actively chasing. Get the promotion. Win back the ex. Solve the murder. Need is unconscious—the truth they’re resisting. Learn to trust people….

Subverting genre conventions is the most common mistake I see in ambitious first novels. The intent is to be bold. The result is usually a confused, disappointed reader. When someone picks up a romance, they’ve made a commitment: they want an emotional journey between two people that ends with hope. You can make that journey…

Most writers insert flashbacks at the worst possible moment. A character has just made a discovery. Stakes are high. The reader is leaning in. And then the scene cuts to six years ago to explain why. The flashback rule I give students: earn it first, then pay it out. Earn it by making the reader…

Writers spend years trying to “find their voice.” Most are looking in the wrong place. Voice doesn’t live in adjectives or sentence length. It lives in what your narrator notices. Pick a room. One writer sees the dirty dishes and thinks about who left them. Another sees the light on the curtains and thinks about…