If you understand fiction, you must have noticed this ironic truth: There’s more fact than fiction in fictional books. Elements of the environment in which an author resides end up trickling into their literary works. The cities in which writers live greatly influence their work—and elements like ancient history, culture, local festivals, and other aspects … Read more
Writing is a very demanding chore, especially if you are writing fiction. But usually, the stages before and after the actual writing are harder—it’s difficult to edit a story and equally difficult to come up with a story idea. Writers are usually full of ideas but figuring out a concrete one, one that can actually … Read more
Extreme pantsers, look away! This won’t interest you if you’re not into outlining. I’m here to talk about outlining, flashlight outlining to be precise. It is okay if you love to ‘pants it’ and don’t want to sit down to plan your story. However, starting to write your story with nothing more than a single … Read more
Good writing is structured, uses good grammar, shows an excellent and discernible pattern, and is well-greased with transitions hence flows smoothly. Above all, it has signposts. Yes, you read that right, HEADINGS. Your readers need and deserve to know where your passage or text is going. Headings are not just there to beautify your books … Read more
I have had a couple of people ask me if “I’m a Plotter or Pantser?” and I still don’t have the exact answer to that question. It’s like I don’t know what each of the two terms means, but I sincerely don’t know which of the two I am. For most people though, it’s a … Read more
Should I self-publish or traditionally publish? That’s a question thousands of writers have asked themselves over the years. And I still see it every other week. A lot of new writers are still confused about which avenue is better. However, a lot of established authors have gone past confusion and have stuck to what they … Read more
For most of us, once we learn how to write by hand, handwriting becomes less of a focus area and we never try to actively improve it as we grow up. The digital age has worsened that problem; more and more people are becoming obsessed with digital platforms and prefer the keyboard to a pen. … Read more
Writing fiction is all about creativity; nothing’s easy, even coming up with names for your characters. You’d think it’s easy to come up with fictional names, but this is fiction and that means writers have to come up with muckles of character names for just one story or novel. Now, that’s hard. Creating character names … Read more
Verb tenses! There are three general categories: Past, Present, and Future. Verb tenses are used to indicate the occurrence of an activity or state of being at a particular time. To put it in simple terms, all verbs are made in reference to time. I’m going to briefly describe the three basic tenses and all … Read more
Publishing a book is a blood-draining process; from writing your first draft to performing a couple of different edits and formatting your entire book. With experience, you start to get familiar with a lot of formatting aspects. One reason for that is because you start to understand the requirements from different publishers, and you can … Read more
