A. Howitt 
C. S. Lakin has penned nineteen novels of various genres. She works professionally as a copyeditor and writing coach, and critiques more than two hundred manuscripts a year. She also guest blogs on the top writing blogs, such as Writers’ Digest and Grammarly, and teaches workshops around the country. Her award-winning blog Live Write Thrive … Read more
One of the best ways to engage readers in a story is to include personal interests. Some interests are shared by lots of people: pets, or baseball, for example. People who love pets usually cry when a furry secondary character dies. Baseball isn’t just a game, it’s a culture, a team, a relationship with your … Read more
I had a problem. Readers sometimes enjoyed my short stories, giving high praise for stories I wrote in a day. Unfortunately, the novels I lovingly crafted for a year or more failed to impress anyone. No matter how I experimented, I couldn’t write a compelling novel, and was getting frustrated over the continuous lack of … Read more
We hear a lot of popular advice on writing forums and in craft books. At the top of the list, along with “show, don’t tell” and “write what you know” is “make it worse.” While any of these bits of advice are great to explore, I am here today to talk specifically about making things … Read more
Where there are writers, there will be writing groups. They may take any number of forms and serve various functions: feedback, support, learning, or commiseration. Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, compares a writing group to “one of those weird little families that we fashion out of whatever’s around us.” It’s so true. … Read more
The clash of blades, sparks flying. The barbarian with his twenty-pound two-handed sword, swinging for your head. The epic showdown with acrobatics… now that’s fantasy.
No, like, seriously a fantasy.
And this article isn’t about any of those things. It’s about swordplay in a realistic situation, using familiar physics and historical inspiration.
We write fantasy, where the possibilities are endless.
I recently reconnected with some old projects, and was a little upset when I read them.
One of the mistakes I’d made was incorrectly anticipating story length, and now it feels like those old stories, that I thought were done and buried, have risen from their graves to haunt me.
Not only did I take some too-big concepts and try to write them into short stories, but I’ve got a few longer works that should probably be trimmed dramatically, because my work is better and cleaner when I begin with a short story format.
While some novels seem so complex that one could hardly try to distill their concepts to a single sentence, others are easy to peg on the first try. What makes it so hard to nail down a concept? And once you have a concept, what length of story will tell it?
Developing one’s confidence as a writer isn’t easy. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know my own path has been an arduous one, and confidence waxed and waned along the way.
I read a fair amount of articles written by a variety of authors and bloggers, and in doing so, it’s become apparent that there’s an implied division between “real” writers and the aspiring. However, I put forth that there is no such division, and we’re all real writers if we dedicate ourselves to the craft.
New writers (or those who have yet to find their stride, as I prefer to think of them) get a bad reputation. How is one to develop confidence when so many articles fall into one of two categories: