Populating your world with interesting people can make readers care about your story, and writing relationships between characters can inspire them to ship, daydream, and root for your characters. Here’s how to help them come alive on the page as real, believable people.

You’ve typed ‘The End’ on your manuscript, and now you’re ready to get published. Not yet! First, finding critique partners will help you polish your work for submission. 

Premise is the short summary of your story, also known as the hook or logline, that informs the reader’s expectations of where the story will go. Stay on track and learn how to structure your personal story with strong premise in memoir.

NYT bestselling author/illustrator Jarrett Krosoczka shares the challenges and gratifications of reaching across different age categories and the importance of illustrations in storytelling. Listen to hear his tips on writing within established franchises (like Star Wars), how to pivot a picture book idea into a graphic novel series, and memoir writing.

Writer burnout is a cousin to writer’s block, with a few key differences. Both states leave you feeling like you should write, you need to write, but you just can’t. I’ll share five tips that’ll help you recover from writer burnout.

If you spend some time getting organized before you query, it will make tracking your submissions more productive and (hopefully) less stressful.

If you’re struggling to figure out how to write your memoir or can’t seem to find the right words, here are three writing practices to make you a better memoir writer and help your memories, reflections, and musings shine bright and clear.

To outline or not? Writing projects start with a spark—a character, a scene, a what-if moment. But what happens from there?

Many aspiring memoirists wonder: how true does my memoir have to be? It can be daunting to think about the holes in our memory, the times we disagree with others about what really happened, or the way time has altered our perception. No one wants to become the latest scandal for lying in a memoir!

Regardless of who I’m talking to—an audience of kid readers, or a group of teachers at a workshop, the most common question I receive is: how to cure writer’s block?

Writers have a love-hate relationship with word count. It’s one of the necessary evils we deal with to determine if a manuscript meets an acceptable published length. So how long should a book be? Here’s a guide to help you answer.

Writers are often cautioned away from flashbacks, but they can connect the dots between the past and who the characters are now. Read on for tips on writing flashbacks that function well.

Danielle Marietta joins the podcast to discuss Books & Things Publishing, the children’s book sphere, and the importance of promoting diverse authors. Tune in to learn more about Danielle’s writing journey, and her tips on self-publishing, social media marketing, and connecting with your target audience.

When done well, rhyming picture books are snappy, quotable, and fun to read. Children retain the words more easily and begin to identify patterns and sounds: a real treat. The problem? Writing a good rhyming picture book is much trickier than it looks.

In a world where life constantly competes for our time, we don’t have the luxury of writing twelve to fifteen drafts of something before we can say it’s done. We need to work smarter, not longer. We need to write productive first drafts. 

You’ve probably written a plot outline for your story, but have you written a character development outline? Here are some tips for developing character arc so your character development is as tight as your plot.

Your first line must grab the reader’s attention and make them not want to put your book down until they get to the last page. So, what makes a great first line? Here are some tips on how to make your novel’s first line zing!

What happens when you’ve written a memoir but find that your words aren’t resonating with readers the way you thought they would? And upon that realization, what do you do or change to bridge the gap?

We want our readers to connect emotionally to our characters and to feel their pains and struggles—but it can be tricky to know how to describe emotion to create that connection. Here are some effective ways to describe emotion.

Reactions go beyond what a character’s body does in the moment. Check this list for ideas for digging your characters out of their physical clichés and moving your story forward.