by Jordan Jolley

Literary devices are the paintbrush. The story is the painting.

We’ve all been taught this ever since we learned how to read. Letters build words. Words build stories. Most of us have also been taught how to make our writing come to life, how to add texture and all that. From my personal style of writing and the ways other authors write, this is very important to know. And it’s not just because we need to add literary devices everywhere.

Continue reading The Best Ways to Use Metaphors and Other Literary Devices →

Book covers can be the last thing you think about as an author, but ultimately, they’re the first thing your readers will see. So how do you find a book cover that will perfectly complement the story you’ve written, edited, and worked so hard to create?

These days, there are plenty of options. You can create your own with a picture or photo. You can ask a friend or colleague to make one, or you can pay someone to design one for you. And, if you’re publishing your book electronically, you can always change the cover down the road–once you’re tired of the old one or have made enough money to replace it.

Continue reading 5 Things to Look For in a Book Cover →

by Felicity Annora

Hello! And welcome back to the wonderfully, weird corner of the internet. YO GIRL IS BACK WITH A WRITING POST.

So before I jump into this headfirst, there’s been some general franticness in the air for writers as NaNoWriMo fast approaches. Me and a friend have been wanting to co-write a book for awhile, and we thought that NaNoWriMo would be the perfect time to do something like that. Except we lacked planning for this story.

Continue reading The Benefits of Co-Writing →

by Lauren Sapala

For the longest time I had major problems doing revisions on my writing. It seemed so easy for everyone else. Why was it so hard for me? Of course, I also had trouble writing. I hardly ever experienced that state of “effortless flow” everyone talked about, in which the words just magically spewed out of me down onto the page. For years—a lot  of years—I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt like I was a failure as a writer.

Then, I discovered something.

Continue reading Stuck with Your Story? Why You Keep Hitting Walls and Dead Ends in Your Writing →

by Liam Cross

As writers, we’re often referred to as some of the strangest, most misunderstood members of society, and it’s a theme that has certainly carried down from generation to generation. It’s probably to do with the creative lifestyle – always obsessing over a project and never being able to properly switch off.

It’s like we have this constant creative buzz in the back of our minds that is ready to erupt at any moment, spilling countless ideas and caffeine-induced plot outlines out into the real world. I say real world because at least eighty percent of our minds are occupied by fiction that was either penned by us, or by some other richer, much more talented writer.

Continue reading 3 Struggles Only a Writer Will Understand →

by ARHuelsenbeck

Disclaimer: I do not have an agent, but I am looking for one, and I have accumulated a lot of information in the process which I am willing to share so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Continue reading How to Get a Literary Agent →

by Michael Cristiano

When it comes to writing, there is nothing more daunting than writing a novel. Okay, maybe attempting to write a saga of twelve novels is a little bit more daunting, but let’s stick to just one for now. In my opinion, writing a novel is a little more difficult than say a short story or a poem. That’s not to say it’s more difficult than writing a good short story or poem, that’s just to point out that short stories and poems don’t generally run 60,000+ words — unless you’re Homer and write two epic poems that come in at over 200,000.

In any case, the enormity of a novel is disillusioning enough on its own, so while we’re at it, let’s disillusion some more.

Continue reading 4 Misconceptions About Writing a Novel →

by Doug Lewars

If you want to become a better writer, become a better editor.

If you want to become a better editor, edit work that is not your own.

I recently joined a local writers’ group and was requested to comment on various extracts from group members completed and in-progress work. I quickly found a number of recommendations I could make for improvement, but what came as a bit of a surprise, was when I went back and started editing some of my own work, I found exactly the same things there. One common mistake is using names too frequently when a pronoun would suffice.

Continue reading The Importance of Editing →

by Lauren Sapala

When I was in college I took a class called Fantasy Literature, which I thought would be nothing but fun and actually turned out to be a lot of hard work. On the first day of class, our professor told us that we would be reading one book a week, and a paper on that book would be due every Monday. The class collectively groaned, until he smiled and said our papers only needed to be one page long. Then we all cheered. And that’s when he got this wicked little smile on his face.

Continue reading Why Query Letters and Synopses Are So Hard to Write (And How to Get Through it) →