Category: How To and Tips
Being Silenced and Breaking Free
As a memoir coach, I have come to realize that my therapy background, as a family and child therapist for nearly forty years, is something I draw on over and over again when I work with memoirists. Over the years I’ve learned a great deal about human passions, suffering, and courage from people I see […]
How Dedicating A Whole Year To Write About Happiness Changed My Life
How dedicating a whole year to write about happiness changed my life, turned into a book, and is changing lives as we speak. Hi, My name is Jacqueline Pirtle. I am an energy healer, mindfulness and happiness coach, and author of the best-selling book 365 Days of Happiness. I help people pull their whole being […]
Lose The Plot
I find it funny how the words ‘plotting’ and ‘downfall’ are so often to be found in the same sentence, because in my writing career, I often feel that it’s plotting – out of all the many elements of fiction-writing – that really is my nemesis. I HATE plotting. I just can’t do it, […]
The Stories of Your Life: Ways to Use Autobiography in Your Fiction
A common trope is that everyone has at least one story to tell, presumably the story of their life, but not everyone chooses to tell that story in writing, either as memoir or as thinly disguised fiction. Of course, even those who do write may create worlds, characters, and plots that are far from the […]
Organic Coherence: Enhancing A Scene’s Effectiveness
How many times have we heard that every scene must have a goal, conflict, and pivot, concluding with an upward or downward shift in the protagonist’s journey? The formulation sounds right and, to an extent, it is. Like most generic advice, however, it’s too rigid and mechanical; something’s left out. That’s because we need to […]
Why I Read and Write about Illness
The thought of a hospital scares some people. Some people think hospital cafeteria food is awful. Some people expect to read a whole book without any bodily fluids making an appearance. I am not one of these people. I love the hospital, the food, and those free little booties they give you. I have had […]
The Worst Piece of Writing Advice I Ever Received (And How it Eventually Became The Best Piece!)
Over the years I think I must have read hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing advice. I’ve written stories for as long as I can remember and so I inhaled every piece of advice I could find – good and bad. The one that kept cropping up was that old classic “Write what you […]
Vision Boards for Authors
Writing for the self-help and personal development genre means I have to walk the walk and talk the talk in my day to day life. Fortunately, I’m also the founder of the Motivate Me Academy so helping women to be the best they can be is in the job description. Using the tools and techniques […]
What My Facebook Post Taught Me About Writing
Nothing is Simple I’m not one to shy away from criticism. In college, creative writing professors not only taught me how to adapt to it but how to charge towards it, arms outstretched shouting, “here I am, make me stronger”. I hadn’t anticipated the impact that would have with one simple post on a writer’s […]
Last Author Standing
I’m not here to tell you how to write a book. You’re doing this already. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be perusing this website or reading this article. I want to tell you why you should keep writing—or not. If you fit the criteria set below, novelist will be your profession. You write because you have more […]
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