If you dig into a writing group, you’ll likely discover two camps: short story writers and novelists. Short story writers specialize in a greater number of short pieces of fiction (let’s say up to 10,000 words), while novelists spend their time writing fewer long works (an “average” adult novel is 80,000 – 100,000 words). Writers…
Confession: I didn’t jump onto the whole “The Walking Dead” bandwagon until recently. Next confession: It was a message series at church that got me on board. But maybe that should be their confession. I was a slow adopter of TWD because it’s such a fad – I never watched it, but all I had…
If I were to pick a show you like and ask who your favorite character is, you would give me a name. If I were to pick five shows and ask for a favorite character across those five, would the favorite be the same? What if you picked a few favorites across all shows and…
When you dream, how do you experience the dream world? Are you yourself? Do you see things from your own eyes or from the outside? What kinds of dreams stick with you after you wake up? Do you jump out of your head and into someone else’s, mid-dream? If you were taken aback by that…
I spent this weekend on a “staycation” with my family. We drove a few hours away from our house to explore the Colorado wilds, including Great Sand Dune National Park and trekking on winding mountain roads in search of fall colors. It was glorious. Quality family time, and I had a great excuse to not…
I had the good fortune of participating in RMFW’s Colorado Gold writing conference this weekend. While I attended several productive workshops, I found a few to be especially informative, including one about sidekicks in fiction. With the permission of presenters Mario Acevedo and Warren Hammond, I’m writing this post so you can also benefit from what I…
I recently wrote a post about why I write. It was a simple exercise in examining why I do what I do. A couple of things happened since then that made me want to expand on that topic – namely, a beta reader and critique partner bailed on my current WIP. They just stopped reading,…
A couple months ago, I wrote a post about writing relatable characters, where I said readers connect most with characters when the characters interact with the story. I want to expand on that today. Characters have (or should have) personalities. Some authors even create big, detailed charts outlining every detail of their characters – looks, intelligence,…
Imagine a misfit kid. He’s picked on. The teacher doesn’t like him, and he’s often in trouble. He’s not from around here, so he has difficulty relating to the locals. After many weeks of loneliness, he tries to win the favor of his classmates by providing them with snacks. All is going well until his popcorn machine…
Last week, I tweeted my blog post about stereotyping characters with the #MondayBlogs hashtag. The user in the pic loved it, retweeted it, and had some questions for me. This is part of the conversation that occurred. I’ve been thinking about the last question ever since. Is defying expectations the key to a good story?…
Allison Maruska 