That Girl Who Wrote A Book

      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 carries on throughout your story. F