by Lynn H. Blackburn @LynnHBlackburn Not too long ago, I learned to SCUBA dive. I was so excited! I’ve wanted to learn for a long time. Unfortunately, I was NOT a star student. Oh, I did great in class. All the calculations for pressure and volume? No problem. (Who says…

by Aaron Gansky @ADGansky If you’ve been writing long, you’ve heard all the evils of using the passive voice. It sneaks into our prose without permission, and disguises itself among our active sentences like a malevolent chameleon. But unless you teach English classes in all your spare time, there’s a…

by Cherrilynn Bisbano @BisbanoWrites My seventy-five year old widowed mom has a veracious appetite for reading. She loves novels about cats. Yes, she is that cat lady. I have a different palates when it comes to novels. I like suspense thrillers and historical fiction. Some of my younger friends consume…

by Lindsey Bracket @LindsBrac The Enneagram is a great tool for building authentic (and flawed) characters. Experts believe everyone carries tendencies of the nine different types—which makes us (and our characters) incredibly complex. The Enneagram’s focus is discovering what motivates you to act the way you do—which is exactly what…

by Alycia Morales @AlyciaMorales Many people love to write and choose to do so as a career. It has its pros and cons, but the joy we get from writing makes it worth those. The question is, which of those pros and cons are scary? [tweet_box design="default" float="none" inject="#writing #writerslife"]8…

@DiAnnMills Dissecting character motivation ushers in the potential of improving your novel to bestselling status. Writers sift through a character’s behavior to find the inner quality that drives the character into action. This core, the deep physiological problem plaguing our character, must be resolved before the character can change and…