by Jill Williamson | Oct 24, 2018 | Antagonists, Plot, Story Middles
You guys. There is WAY too much going on in my life right now. I feel like a hamster on a wheel that someone rolled down a very steep hill. Anyone relate? Anyone? Bueller? “Hang on, Jill,” I tell myself. “Almost there.” Where...
by Stephanie Morrill | Oct 22, 2018 | Brainstorming, First Drafts, Writing Competitions
While November is officially National Novel Writing Month, October is unofficially prep-your-novel-for-NaNoWriMo month. If you’re not familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is an international event where you “win” by writing 50,000 words during the month of...
by Shannon Dittemore | Oct 19, 2018 | First Drafts, Grow An Author
It’s Friday again! Doughnuts all around, methinks! Over the past few weeks we’ve been discussing the cracks that have a tendency to show up in our manuscripts when we reach the mid-way point of our first draft. We’ve looked at ways to address...
by Jill Williamson | Oct 17, 2018 | Plot
You’ve likely heard both of the writing terms: midpoint twist and mirror moment. We’ve talked about them here before, but I don’t think we’ve talked about them together. I’m going to talk about them together. 🙂 The whole point of the...
by Stephanie Morrill | Oct 15, 2018 | Editing
Jill and I are super excited to announce that we are releasing a REVISED AND UPDATED version of our popular 2013 release Go Teen Writers: How To Turn Your First Draft Into a Finished Book! The new title is Go Teen Writers: Edit Your Novel, and will be available for...
by Shannon Dittemore | Oct 12, 2018 | First Drafts, Grow An Author, Plot, Story Structure
Over the past few Fridays, we’ve been talking about the pitfalls of story middles. Often it’s here, in the dead center of things, that we begin to notice the cracks climbing through the words of our tale. It’s easy to panic and abandon our story for something new and...
by Jill Williamson | Oct 10, 2018 | First Drafts, Plot
It’s no secret that I love screenwriter Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat. That’s where I first learned the term “promise of the premise.” Every book or movie makes a promise to potential readers and viewers. For a book, this promise comes...
by Stephanie Morrill | Oct 8, 2018 | Editing, First Drafts, Grow An Author
For the past couple weeks, we’ve been talking about story middles. Shannon talked about how in the middle you often find cracks in your masterpiece, and fixing character problems that crop up. I talked about creating a big midpoint scene, and the structure of...
by Shannon Dittemore | Oct 5, 2018 | First Drafts, Grow An Author
Writing a story is no easy task, but it’s fun to dream up new lives and new worlds, and our initial excitement often gives us the momentum to make a fair amount of progress up front. For most of us, the cracks in our stories don’t start appearing until we’ve reached...
by Jill Williamson | Oct 3, 2018 | Punctuation
Once upon a time, there was an author named Jill Williamson. Jill was a blogger on a website called goteenwriters.com. She had worked as an editor for a few years, then became an author and a writing teacher. As she read the manuscripts of many beginning writers, she...
