Writing Tips

Every writer has five or six words they can’t stop using. Ask ten writers to name theirs and you’ll get nine wrong answers. Mine is “that.” I’ve spent years training myself to hear it, and it still slips into every draft I write. Yours might be “just,” or “suddenly,” or “seemed.” Whatever it is, you…

Check the scoreboard of most unpublished manuscripts and you’ll find the same lopsided season: the protagonist wins. Most of the middle, scene after scene. A lucky clue here, an argument that lands, a plan that works on the first try. Each small win drains tension the climax will need later. The middle of your book…

Every memoir writer hits the same wall: “I can’t write that conversation. I don’t remember what was actually said.” So they summarize it, and the scene dies on the page. Memory keeps the shape of an exchange: who went quiet, who joked at the wrong moment, a mother saying something kind in a voice with…

The diagnosis, the confession, the phone call at 3 a.m. Your book spends 200 pages building to one moment, and when it finally arrives, the character absorbs it in four paragraphs and the story moves on. Writers rush the pivot scenes. Partly fear of melodrama, partly the discomfort of looking straight at big feeling, so…

Somewhere around chapter 14, the telepath suddenly needs to touch people to read their minds. Nobody established that rule. The plot needed a door to close, so the door closed. Science fiction runs on contracts. The first time you show a rule working, whether it’s faster-than-light travel, magic with a price, or a machine that…

When the plot takes something from your character, the reader should feel the theft personally. Most of the time they don’t. Watch You’ve Got Mail again. Kathleen loses her children’s bookstore, and it wrecks you, because you’ve spent the whole movie inside it. You know the rocking horse. You know storybook hour. By the time…

A refusal only bites when part of the character wants to say yes. Most writers write refusals as arguments. Tempers flare, voices rise, doors slam. Fine, but forgettable. The scene that stays with readers is the one where a character says no to something they want. Pride and Prejudice builds its entire third act on…

Your biggest scene is probably your fastest one. Not on purpose. Big emotion is uncomfortable to sit in, so we sprint through it, and speed feels like intensity. It isn’t. Speed at the pivot reads as panic. When your story reaches the moment everything has been building toward, halt time. Not with description. With one…

Mary Karr doesn’t open The Liars’ Club with her mother’s diagnosis. She opens on a night in 1961: a Gulf Coast refinery town, six-year-old Mary and her big sister Lecia on the porch steps, waiting while their mother is walked out to the car in the yard and taken away. That scene is the memoir…

A narrator who lies badly is a magic trick with the wire showing. The reader spots the cheat by chapter three and spends the rest of the book ahead of you. The mistake is overplaying the hand. Contradictions on page 4, hedges that flag themselves, memories narrated a little too neatly. The unreliable narrators who…