That Girl Who Wrote A Book

      The villain of your story is arguably the most important character-- even more important than the protagonist. A good villain will challenge your other characters. A great villain will drive your story.      When characterizing your bad guy,  not only do you have to define why they are the way they are, but you also have to make them reasonable. You can't just give your villain a tragic backstory and call it a day, because oftentimes that's not what makes a villain a villain. There has to be some deeper reason behind it. You have to design a character with such depth that your readers can understand them. You know you've done your job well when your readers begin to sympathize with them.     Take Draco Malfoy for example. He bullies Harry Potter and all of his friends, and just generally isn't a good person. But for some reason, fans of the Harry Potter series love Draco, and some even prefer him over the other characters. That's becaus...

    Trauma makes a character great. It is an understanding amongst the writing community that if you don't make your characters suffer, your story will be boring. But what nobody seems to realize is that there is a right way to torture your characters and there is a wrong way.      Let's start by discussing the wrong way to challenge your characters. Something that I find very mundane is when a character can go through hell and come out with a smile on their face. Remember that everyone has their breaking point, and so your character should too. If you want to be realistic, your character will not face everything with a big, cheesy smile. Even the most resilient characters (if written well) will reach a point where they can't seem to go on any longer.       T he moment your character breaks is the most important moment in your story. It is the moment that they change, whether it be for the better or for the worse. If you rush through this dev...

      If you've never experienced writers block, you're lying. Or, you're a very special individual and I'm jealous of you. Either way, it's a disease that eats away at you until you force yourself to do something about it or magically manage to recover.     There are many things that may cause writer's block: you just finished a scene and don't know where to go next, you're overwhelmed with ideas that you don't know where to start, or you've been working so hard on other things that you're to mentally drained to even think about sitting down and writing. There are probably other reasons you may be feeling uninspired, but these are the ones that I find often happen to me.      If we're being completely honest, the best way to deal with writers block is to just wait for it to past. Sometimes if you actively try to overcome it, it'll just make it worse. In my experience, the best way to overcome writers block is to try not to worry abou...

     An aspect of story telling that some writers struggle with where others may thrive is dialogue. I am proud to be able to say that dialogue is one of my strengths (many of my professors and readers can attest to this), so today I am going to share some of my tips and tricks.      One mistake many people make when writing dialogue is adding complex dialogue tags. For those who might not know, a dialogue tag is when you put "he/she said" at the end of a bit of dialogue to determine which character is speaking. Many novice writers like to embellish their dialogue tags by saying "she dictated" or "she told them." While these are not necessarily bad phrases to use, it can become a little distracting if every other dialogue tag is something completely different from the last. Most readers have trained their brains to ignore the phrase "he/she said," so when it get's switched up every time, it makes it harder to focus on what the characters are ...

     Everybody remembers their high school English class and having to write essays about the figurative language used in whatever book you were currently reading. I remember complaining whenever my teachers would talk about symbolism, because how do you know that's actually what the author meant? What if they didn't even mean anything by it? What if the apple is just an apple?     Today, I'd like to destroy your dreams by telling you that an apple is not just an apple.      It wasn't until I started taking writing seriously that I realized how much fun figurative language can be. It can be used symbolically, to foreshadow, and to enrich the story itself. But be careful not to overuse it. If your entire manuscript is figurative language on top of figurative language, it can become confusing and difficult to read.     My personal favorite form of figurative language to use is metaphors. Metaphors can easily be turned into a symbol that ca...