What are “Morning Pages”?
“Morning pages” is the term coined by Julia Cameron in her work The Artist’s Way used to describe the habit of sitting […]
How to Write Round Characters
If you’ve ever fallen in love with a character who jumped off the page and felt so alive that you missed them […]
Screenplay Format: Tips & Essentials
Getting your screenplay format down right matters more than you might think. You could write the most brilliant story ever conceived, with […]
Worldbuilding
Crafting a compelling story comes with several responsibilities. You are in charge of creating the plot, the characters, the prose, the dialogue, […]
What is a Thematic Statement?
Your story’s thematic statement is the central argument that drives your narrative. Writers sometimes obsess over their plot to the point that […]
How to Write Dialogue
Writing dialogue can be intimidating, even for the most experienced writers. Sometimes the words feel clumsy and unnatural, or we find ourselves […]
Fridging: When Trauma Replaces Character Development
The “fridging” trope was named after a specific incident in a Green Lantern comic (vol. 3 #54). The titular hero comes home […]
What is the Three-Act Structure?
In his book, Poetics, Aristotle laid the foundation for story structure by stating that all stories must have a beginning, middle, and […]
The Snowflake Method of Outlining
Writing a story can sometimes seem overwhelming. Think of your favorite books. You can tell when a writer has put a great […]
Getting Past Writer’s Block
Writer’s block can feel like a brick wall in your mind. The words stop flowing and the page seems impossible to fill. […]
Purple Prose
Like all things in life, the way we write requires balance. When you look back on your first attempts at writing, you […]
Storyline: Marrying Plot to Theme
Every screenplay is built around a single invisible force that holds everything together. You may not notice it on first viewing, but […]
Backstory: What to Reveal and When
Backstory includes all the events from your characters’ pasts, details about their origins, plus any essential background information necessary to advance the […]
Jungian Archetypes for Character Building
Stories that endure tend to tap into something deeply human. Philosophers, mythologists, psychologists, and more have theorized about different ways audiences resonate […]
What is the “Story Circle”?
In simple terms, storytelling consists of three things: the beginning, middle, and end. However, this basic structure can often hide extremely complicated […]
The Writing Process
Writing is an act of magic. Out of thin air you’ve conjured something and put it onto the page. People come up […]
What is Magical Realism?
Magical realism invites the impossible into the ordinary. This genre asks us to accept the fantastical without question. The supernatural appears alongside […]
Parallelism: Crafting Meaning in Repetition
There’s no rhythm without some repeated notes. Certain literary and rhetorical devices are so ingrained in how we speak and think that […]
