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Story ideas are only as good as our ability to express them in writing.
If you need help, you're in the right place to explore posts and topics about writing craft on Jami's blog, including writing and editing tips.
(And don't miss the pages exploring the topics of Storytelling, Career & Publishing, and Process & Miscellaneous posts.)
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Highlighted Posts within Writing Craft Topics
Drafting, Revising, and Self-Editing Our Story & Its Elements
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Posts to Learn about Writing
The Learn About Writing category of Jami's blog is filled with tip-heavy posts about writing skills and concepts that improve our stories.
Sample topics:
* avoiding information dumps
* using point of view
* adding subtext
* using themes
* building scenes, etc.
Below, check out the category's featured posts, as well as some of its latest posts.
For more posts on this topic, click the button at the bottom of this section to explore the whole category.
Featured Post
How Can We Learn and Improve Our Writing Skills?
Want to improve your writing? Here are the strengths and weaknesses of 5 common ways to learn and improve our writing craft.
Featured Post
How to Create Scene Endings that Hook Readers
We’ve been talking about the difference types of transitions we might create between scenes and plot events. Today, we’re focusing on the types of sentences that will strengthen our scene endings (and thus our scenes).
Featured Post
How to Weave Story Elements and Avoid Info Dumps
Our stories consist of many elements—from backstory to dialogue—that each contribute to our story. Yet we can overdo those elements with an information dump. How can we include the different elements while making sure we don’t cross over into Info Dump Land? Let’s talk options…
Featured Post
How to Get Our Thoughts onto the Page
Probably no one can claim to be an expert at making sure the cool character in our head makes it onto the page. We can only guess at how readers will interpret what we tell them. Advice can help us share our brain with our readers as much as possible, but the process will never—ever—be completely clean.
Featured Post
How to Strengthen Emotions in Our Writing
Want to avoid flat, unemotional writing? We have to match our characters’ emotional reactions to the stimulus, whether big or small.
Posts to Learn about Editing
The Editing Your Story category of Jami's blog is filled with editing tips and advice to improve our drafts.
Sample topics:
* saving broken stories
* revising tricks
* using beat sheets for revisions
* making our writing stronger
* MS Word tricks
* fixing unlikable characters, etc.
Below, check out the tag's featured posts, as well as some of its latest posts.
For more posts on this topic, click the button at the bottom of this section to explore the whole tag.
Featured Post
How to Save a Broken Story
A truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
Featured Post
Writing Habits: We Can’t Fix What We Don’t See
Virtually every program to change our habits starts with the same step: recognizing our habits. We can’t fix what we don’t see, know, or understand. Let’s take a look at some of the things we can do to identify our writing craft habits…so we can then work to improve them.
Featured Post
The Most Important Question in Storytelling: “Why?”
A common problem—even in traditionally published books—is Missing Motivations. A character’s goal can feel irrelevant if readers don’t understand why they have that goal. Or a character might seem stupid or unlikable if readers don’t know why they’re acting a certain way.
Featured Post
Too Close? 5 Techniques to See Our Story Objectively
After we complete a first draft, we might want to dig into revising right away because we’re still excited and passionate about the premise. But it’s often better to gain “distance” from our story first. Distance helps us see our story objectively so we can revise ruthlessly, not clinging to our intentions but seeing our story’s potential.
Featured Post
6 Steps to Balance Your Editing: Plot vs. Characters
When starting a revision, we often struggle to see the underlying issue to know how to fix it. Do we need to change the plot? The characters? Both?
Posts about Point of View
The Point of View and Showing vs. Telling tags of Jami's blog are filled with tips and advice on developing the best perspective for our story.
Sample topics:
* our POV options
* which character's POV to use
* unreliable narrators
* using POV to prevent boring descriptions, etc.
Below, check out featured posts, as well as some latest posts, from both tags.
For more posts on these topics, click the buttons at the bottom of this section to explore each tag, and find more posts like how we shouldn't assume showing is better or how to use layers to show strong emotions.
Featured Post
How Does Our Character’s POV Affect Our Story?
Why is POV so important to understand? The better we understand the power of our character’s POV, the stronger we can make our characters and our story.
Featured Post
Beyond Visuals: How to “Show” with Other Senses
The word showing obviously makes us think visually, but same as us, our characters experience the world through more than just their visual sense. What are our options for showing beyond visual descriptions? Can we create a deeper world by engaging other senses?
Featured Post
Why Is Head Hopping Considered Lazy Writing?
Several writing craft issues tend to be hallmarks of what’s called “lazy writing.” The practice of head hopping is usually considered lazy writing, but we might not understand why it earns that label. Let’s learn more and see how we can avoid head hopping and the “lazy writing” trap.
Featured Post
Showing vs. Telling: Finding the Right Balance
It’s not always easy to know how much showing or telling works best for our story, so let’s dig a little deeper into some of the problems with trying to find the right balance of showing and telling in our stories.
Featured Post
7 Methods for Handling Point-of-View Changes
In deep POV, especially, we want to avoid “head-hopping” and maintain our story’s immersion. But that means we need to know the right way to change the point-of-view of our story.
Posts about Pacing
The Pacing and Tension tags of Jami's blog are filled with tips and advice about finding the right pace and level of tension for our story.
Sample topics:
* strengthening our story's stakes
* analyzing whether our story needs more conflict
* how different story elements affect pacing
* using time passage to skip boring parts, etc.
Below, check out featured posts, as well as some latest posts, from both tags.
For more posts on these topics, click the buttons at the bottom of this section to explore each tag, and find more posts like how to fix an info dump passage or the benefits of adding more obstacles.
Featured Post
Story Elements: Give Them Purpose
For a strong story pace, we need to ensure every element has purpose. How can we do that? How can we know if a scene or sentence is pointless?
Featured Post
How Pacing Helps Readers Care about Our Characters
I never watched Game of Thrones but this past season is an excellent example of how pacing can affect character arcs and readers’ relationships to our characters.
Featured Post
Plot Obstacles: Too Easy, Too Difficult, or Just Right?
Our characters have to overcome many obstacles throughout our plot, but changing the obstacles doesn’t always fix story problems. Sure, sometimes an obstacle doesn’t fit the story, but too often, the obstacle itself isn’t what’s broken—it’s the storytelling around the obstacle.
Featured Post
When Should We Skip a Scene in Our Story?
Every story beat or turning point scene—when events affect the main story question, conflict, or goal—needs to be included in a story. But what about non-turning-point scenes? How can we tell when to include them and when we can skip ahead?
Featured Post
How to Raise the Stakes in Our Story
Threats and obstacles can develop the plot and increase the tension in our story, but they’re not necessarily the same thing as stakes. So let’s talk more about what it means to amp up the stakes in our story.
Posts about Story Flow
The Cause and Effect and Scenes and Sequels tags of Jami's blog are filled with writing tips and advice focused on story flow.
Sample topics:
* the benefits of foreshadowing
* correct use of past perfect tense
* whether every scene needs a goal
* watching out for redundancy, etc.
Below, check out featured posts, as well as some latest posts, from both tags.
For more posts on these topics, click the buttons at the bottom of this section to explore each tag, and find more posts like how to fix choppy writing and how to ensure subplots fit with a story's flow.
Featured Post
How Do We Use Sequels with Our Scenes?
Of the many confusing words in the writing world, the worst might be the terms “scenes and sequels.” What’s the purpose of sequels and how do we write them?
Featured Post
Transition Techniques: Meanwhile, in Our Subplot…
Last time, we discussed how to identify and fix episodic writing to make our stories stronger with the “But” and “Therefore” rule. However, there’s another option for transitioning from scene to scene: the “meanwhile.”
Featured Post
How to Make Our Story Feel Meaningful
Story is different from plot, but sometimes we can have lots of plot ideas, and we might not be sure if—or how—we can pull those together into something that feels like a story. Let’s get some tips…
Featured Post
Cause and Effect: Understanding Story Flow
In the real world, the cause of something happens before the effect. But in writing, we can put words into any order we want, which might leave the reader confused. If they have to reverse events in their head, they’re probably no longer immersed in our story. Not good.
Featured Post
Actions and Reactions: The End-All-Be-All of Storytelling
A story’s narrative is made up of a chain of actions (motivation/cause) and reactions (response/effect). The cause-and-effect chain, whether at the scale of story acts or sentences, creates our narrative drive: Is the story leading somewhere?
Additional Writing Craft Resources
Other Favorites in Writing Craft Topics
Jami's blog has hundreds of posts about writing craft, so she couldn't limit herself to just the Featured Posts in the above sections. Here are a few more favorite posts on the topics of characterization, determining story details, revising, and grammar and copy editing skills that she couldn't resist highlighting.
- One Simple Trick to Avoid an Opening Page Infodump
- Should Our Protagonist Be in the First Scene?
- Can Common Writing Advice Be Wrong?
- Story Conflict: Villains vs. Antagonists
- Is Our Story’s Point of View Really What We Think It Is?
- Breaking Down the Steps of Revision to Improve Our Storytelling
- Story Revisions: Keeping Track of Changes
- Re-Envisioning: How to Fix Big Problems with Small Changes
- Strengthen Your Writing with Rhetorical Devices
- Active vs. Passive Voice: Was and Not Was
- Storytelling Verb Tenses: Past, Present, and “Literary” Past Tense
- Character Internalization: To Italicize or Not to Italicize?
- Writing Craft Basics: How to Format Dialogue
- How to Improve Our Story with Action Beats
- Dread Writing Sexy Scenes? 5 Tips for Success
- Character Likability and Subtext
Other Helpful Tags in Writing Craft Topics
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