Stop me if you’ve heard this one: You’ve written a first draft. It took weeks, months, years. You’ve struggled, you’ve cried, you’ve bled onto the page. But you did it, you found the story, and finally wrote the words The End . Then you realized…finishing your first draft is most certainly not  the end.   Revisions can feel entirely overwhelming. Suddenly the story you’ve put so much into feels wrong in its very bones. Aside from the few moments that you love, you feel like t

Apparently, I’m obsessed with first pages. Why? Because I know how hard it is to write a first page that gets readers to invest .   The truth of it is, the first few pages have to do a lot of things to keep a reader interested. We, as writers, want to give all those things because we know how great our story is. Unfortunately, it is very easy  to lose sight of what actually is important and how the readers will respond to the first few pages of our wonderful, wonderful storie

This month has been about dialogue. I love  writing dialogue. I tend to use dialogue to guide my scenes and I focus on description and exposition in later drafts. However, I know a lot of authors who are the complete opposite. So what’s a writer who doesn’t naturally gravitate to dialogue to do? Here’s the trick with dialogue: Make it real. But not too  real.   Easy right? Keep it real, mostly Writers often go one of two ways when writing dialogue: 1) super realistic 2) super

This month, I have focused on giving you tips to help grab your reader’s attention, and keep it, in the first pages.  The reason for this is that when a reader is new to you, you don’t have time to set the stage, build your world, or indulge us in backstory. Readers don’t want to invest in something that they aren’t sure will pay off.  The original version of my novel Taken by His Sword that I sent to agents was 115k words and it started with a three chapter description of ho

Being an author is weird because the writing process forces you to be alone and in your thoughts for so much time . And then your story...

Do you struggle to get yourself to sit down and write? Or maybe you can get yourself seated, but you have a hard time staying focused and...

Some people just have art built into them, don’t they? So what are the rest of us supposed to do? I have a minor in music. I wasn’t a...

Any fans of The Cure out there?! If you have ever written anything , then surely you can relate to this.  Staring at a blank screen and a...

Not really. Just quit swearing so much. I don't mean that writing should be clean and unabrasive. I mean the opposite. Swear words are an...

As it turns out, my natural writing voice is that of a 1940s gangster.  To clarify, I am not a 1940s gangster.  I was born in the 80s,...

I have an MFA in creative writing which means that I really believe that I am an awesome writer. Like I really like my writing. I...

When I went into my first Romance Writers of America (RWA) conference, I was given a nametag and then faced with a selection of little...