Tagged: Writing Advice

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Naming Characters

Naming Characters

by JP McLean.

In his famous Romeo and Juliet soliloquy, Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a Name?”

 

Quite a lot, as it turns out. I don’t have children, so the only names I’ve bestowed are on my fictional characters and my dogs. Happily, my choices have yet to be challenged (at least by the dogs).

 

Still, it’s important to find a good fit between the character and the name you choose. A name invokes an image in a reader’s mind. The way the name is spelled, how it rolls off the tongue, how it looks visually on a page—all these things add nuance to the character.

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How Do Writers Come Up With Ideas?

Where do You Get Your Ideas?

As a writer, I get asked a lot of questions. The most common one, aside from “Why are you like this?” or “What’s wrong with you?” is “Where do you get your ideas?” I’m sure most of you have heard this time and again too.

I mean though… where the heck do they come from?

I like to imagine they come from a colossal warehouse located in another dimension. Endless aisles of file boxes stacked infinitely high, sorted by type. Scurrying, gnome-like creatures with glasses bustle about, pulling down the correct box, extracting the exact file needed, and rushing to the pneumatic tubes that connect to writers’ brains.

There’s a command center where larger, more intelligent goblins track incoming requests for ideas, sent either directly from the writer, or their muse. They operate a massive switchboard, like something out of an Earth-circa-1960s telephone company, scrambling to fill as many idea orders as possible at breakneck speed.

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How Can Writers Vary Sentence Structure?

How Can Writers Vary Sentence Structure?

Diversifying Your Sentence Structure for Variety and Pacing

Many years ago during a presentation at the now defunct Antioch Writers’ Workshop, I made a reference to “lazy writing.” One of the attendees asked me to clarify what I meant by that, and I mentioned, as examples, reusing the same word in a single paragraph, using clichéd phrasing, starting consecutive paragraphs with the same word, and repetitive sentence structure.

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How Do Writers Use Pathos?

Pathos: a Greek word meaning both ‘suffer’ and ‘experience.’

Interestingly, one of your goals as a writer is to make your characters experience suffering. Because happy characters make for pretty dull fiction.

When people say you should make your readers feel something, they’re talking about pathos.

There are a number of ways to do this—some more efficient than others. Some will, undoubtedly, work better for you than for someone else. Writing is one of the most personal and subjective things there is. It’s important, as with all aspects of your craft, to employ this tool with caution. Too much pathos and you risk overwhelming, and subsequently emotionally deadening, your reader. Too little and they’re not engaged at all.

The key is to strike a balance—make ‘em feel but don’t beat them over the head with it.

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How to Write a Horror Story for a Child and an Adult Reader

How to Write a Horror Story for a Child and an Adult Reader

Fairytales and old folklore stories include many supernatural elements that are somehow related to our fictional reality. While it’s natural for such altered events to be part of our lives through the collective subconscious, many of them are not taught to children out of an unknown fear. 

We don’t want to put our kids in danger or affect their reality in any way. This is why we don’t allow them to watch horror movies or thriller shows. We try to keep them as far as possible from these myths. In reality, children should understand that there is a mysterious part to our conscious world, that synchronistic realities can, in fact, interfere, and that horror stories are nothing but a part of our subconscious imagination. 
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Guest Post: How I write quiet horror

How I write quiet horror

By: Die Booth

 

As an author I’m absolutely delighted that the term ‘quiet horror’ is recently gaining a bit of traction in the writing world. I’ve struggled for years to come up with the right, understood, term for the stories I pen that manage to straddle the horror and ‘literary’ genres in a way that is sometimes a nightmare to market or even describe. So here are my tips on how to write quiet horror.

 
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7 Tips How to Come Up with the Main Characters of Horror Story

7 Tips How to Come Up with the Main Characters of Horror Story

 

Writing horror stories is way more challenging than making horror movies. The feelings and emotions a horror book or story creates are pretty different from the sensations watching a horror movie gives you. And in a horror story, not only the environment, the sounds, the incredible actions are the ones that could catch the attention of a reader. It is also about the characters, and especially about the main characters of the story. 

 

They are the ones that initiate some actions, they take part in every event, they go through difficult and challenging situations, and so on. People who read a story or watch a movie live the action along with the main characters, so how you build them is very important. They need to be memorable to be remembered by the audience, so you need to work on crafting the best main characters. How can you do this? Well, here you have seven tips to come up with the main characters of a horror story. 

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Anti-Social Skills for Improve Your Writing

Anti-Social Skills for Improve Your Writing

In reality, it is important to improve your social skills to interact with other people better. But a writer needs some anti-social skills to pull off excellent writing. For instance, if you want to describe horror scenes, you need to set your unsocial side to work to describe better. It sounds weird, right? Don’t allow it to be.

 

Writers are typically introspective. They perceive the world with depth. So it helps them to carve out stories from their thoughts and contemplations.  In most cases, writers are often viewed as idealists who lose themselves to the reflections in their minds. They bear untold stories in their hearts every step of the way. 

 

However, some novice writers can’t even tell when their minds are creating a story. So the real challenge is to translate untold stories into a character’s words. You can find out about it on Ninjaessay. They offer essay samples that can help you to see the light. It comes to what your anti-social skills are and how to channel them to your writing. 

 

What Are Anti-Social Skills?

First things first—what are anti-social skills?  Let’s be honest. It’s challenging to create a meaning for anti-social skills in this context. It is because they are not typically described as skills but harmful behaviors that disrupt societal activities. In many cases, the phrase “anti-social” is often associated with personality disorders.” But in the world of writing, anti-social behavior is a skill and not a harmful behavior.  Social skill is the ability to communicate with others. But an anti-social skill is the ability to communicate with yourself. 

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