Tag: women writers
Why I Write Funny Feminist Noir
When I was in grad school, I dated a guy who would dress me up in skimpy outfits, lock me in handcuffs, and put me in a box. No, not like that! He was a magician and I was his assistant. My kitten, Merlin, was his magic rabbit. He would pull Merlin from a hat […]
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 […]
Two Truths And A Lie: What I’ve Learned Going From Small Press To A Big Publisher
We’ve all played this game, or at least some version of it. It’s an icebreaker activity in which partygoers circle up and introduce themselves by telling two true things and one lie. It’s then up to the remainder of the players to guess what is real and what is not. Oftentimes the false statement is […]
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 […]
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING THEIR CHARACTERS; Amy Blumenfeld
Interview with Becca Scardino from THE CAST, by Amy Blumenfeld Becca, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. My pleasure! Thanks for having me. So, how does it feel to have a book written about your group of friends? Surreal. Honestly, I laughed the first time Amy approached us with the idea. […]
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 […]
How Childhood Reading Shapes Identity
Little Women turned me into a writer. I identified with Meg, but longed to be Jo. In Concord, Massachusetts, visitors to the Orchard House can see the tiny desk on which Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868. Visitors to the Alcott family home also learn that Bronson Alcott, an idealist and progressive teacher, […]
Better Together
Five years ago, I was close enough to having a finished manuscript for my first novel, Even in Darkness, that I began to seriously explore how to get it published. The novel was a fictional rendering of the life story of a relative I’d known and admired and whose resilience and glass-half-full life philosophy deeply […]
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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