It’s not the first time you felt stymied as a writer.
It happens. You’re looking at a sentence you wrote and thinking, “Do you put a comma before so?”
Is so a coordinating conjunction? Is it a subordinating conjunction? Is it an adverb?
The short answer is, “Sure. It can be any of those things.” But until you see when and how, knowing that doesn’t help much.
Once you know the rules described in this post, though, say goodbye to confusion.
You won’t miss it.
Do you know the essential parts of a story — or why they’re essential?
Think back to the last story you read (or listened to) that captured your imagination and held onto it to the end.
Chances are the story elements described in this article were responsible for that.
And you can probably point to at least one of them and remember how that element in the story took hold of you.
But what are the elements of a compelling story?
And how do you put them together to create one of your own?
The most powerful way to engage your reader is to invoke strong emotion.
Readers who quickly empathize are more likely to keep reading a story that invites them to do just that.
We’ve rounded up 101 heartbreaking, sad writing prompts to make your job easier.
And since sad prompts aren’t always enough, we’ve thrown in some story ideas to show how you can spin a few words into a story your reader can’t put down.
With fanfiction, the writer of a movie, TV series, or book has already done the character building.
As the fanfic writer, you get to throw your favorite characters into different “what if” situations.
Plenty of Doctor Who fanfiction writers, for example, write stories bringing the 10th Doctor and Rose Tyler closer together.
Just how close they get depends on the writer. But a solid ship (i.e., pairing) can generate a slew of spicy fanfic ideas.
Fanfiction is a great way to build a devoted readership and develop your writing skills.
All you need now is a list of intriguing fanfiction story ideas.
When you’re a writer, you need to know the best strategies to get your reader’s attention and hold onto it.
The goal is to get them hooked on your content, so they’ll want to read more.
Only then can you cultivate a relationship that serves you both.
So, how do you do that (without actually hypnotizing them)?
You learn different writing strategies, applied to advantage by the pros, and work on making them your own.
The first question to answer is, “What is a writing strategy?”
From the time you learn how to talk, you have stories to tell.
Faced with a classroom writing assignment, though, you can feel the fog rolling in, hiding all your best personal narrative ideas.
To clear that fog, sometimes, all you need are some simple questions to get started, which is why so many of the personal narrative prompts in this post include them.
You’ll find the prompts grouped by theme to make your search for ideas easier.
What is passive voice misuse?
How do you know if you’re overdoing it with passive voice constructions?
And is active voice always better?
If you’ve ever run your work through the Heminway Editor, you know it flags passive voice right away (along with wordy or overly long sentences).
Human editors, too, tend to bristle at the overuse of passive voice.
So, it’s a huge time-saver when you know how to recognize and correct it in your writing.
Read on to learn how.