Whew! We’re almost to the finish line in our series. Can you believe it? Today we’re talking about a topic that I think gets overlooked – writing youthful characters accurately, especially in non-YA or children’s stories. I was an elementary teacher for more than a decade, and part of that was studying child development. We…
Yes, I cheated. A little. I figured we didn’t really need to know about xylophones, x-rays, or…xenomorphs. Isn’t English fun sometimes? Anyway, today in our series we’re talking about the nitty gritty of writing – punctuation. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. We’re only talking about exclamation marks because 1. I used them to cheat in…
I’ve been a little nervous about today’s post in our series since M day. You guys responded so well to that and one or two of you said something to this effect: I can’t want to see what you have for the W post. All right. Let’s do this. *cracks knuckles* I posted about women characters…
The next post in our series brings us to the reason many people read stories, especially adventure and fantasy stories. We love to see our heroes emerge victorious, don’t we? She’s battled all of the author’s rocks, and at least once or twice it looked like defeat was assured. But she overcame. Or maybe she…
What the frick does underwear have to do with writing a story? you may be asking. On S day we talked about stereotypes. Today’s post in our series is a strategy for avoiding accidental stereotypes: knowing thy characters. Inside and out. What their jobs, hobbies, favorite foods, preferred music, and maybe kinky tendencies are. Because the…
Today’s post in our series came up in the comments on POV day, because the two often go hand-in-hand. While POV determines through which character’s (or narrator’s) eyes we’re seeing the story, tense determines when the story is happening. Kind of. There are three basic tenses: past, present, and future. Stories are told in past and…
Holy title alliteration, Batman! Still, stereotyping stuff strips stories of satisfying substance. And now I’ve accidentally summarized the post in an alliterated sentence. I guess you can all go home. Kidding. Sit down. Stereotypes are overgeneralized ideas, and they are serious enough that if you google “narrative stereotypes” you get academic articles in the top…
This isn’t just about romance books, so don’t leave, other genre writers! Everyone back? Good. We are talking romance in our series today, but not about the romance category in the bookstore. We’re talking about writing romance in general, because most stories have a romantic subplot, at least. I’m generally not a fan of the…
How many different Q posts there will be in the A-Z challenge? There are fewer available words – I’m not sure how many bloggers will pick up on quarters, quizzes, and queens – or in the case of writing, maybe a quest. Perhaps our queen quickly quests into a quagmire. Damn. There are more possibilities than…
Ah, yes. We’ve reached one of my very favorite writing topics in our series. *cracks knuckles and wiggles fingers* I love point of view (POV from here on) so much I’ve written about it here and here and here and probably to a lesser extent in other posts. What can I say? POV gets me fired…
Allison Maruska 