Trying to find your way? Look here for some help with navigating the wealth of information at the Storm Writing School blog.
Every great writer relies on great readers. Who should you enlist to read your work as it’s in development? Lovers, critics, alphas, betas, pros, and more.
Action is important for stories, but not all action moves characters. Here, we discuss three requirements for action in your stories using a questionable football analogy.
What is filtering, what’s the rationale for avoiding it, and in what situations might you want to stick with it?
Writing epiphanies and realizations can be difficult; how can you make them feel earned and not contrived? Here, we examine the keys to successful realizations in storytelling.
Objects are crucial to a story’s being unique and affecting. Here, we look at 5 ways to use objects to tighten up your story and make it more powerful.
Robert Olen Butler describes 5 ways the people express emotions. Writers can use these expressions to help build better character interiority. Here, his 5 expressions and an accompanying journal exercise.
The idea behind subjective conflict is this: the reader can sometimes experience conflict even when the characters in the story don’t. This week’s article appears at DIYMFA.
There’s a lot of writing advice out there. It is not difficult to find. It is also not difficult to feel overwhelmed by it all and, consequently, a bit inadequate as a writer. You do not need to follow all of it. In fact, if you can differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive advice, you’ll be on your way to cutting through the glut.
Physical expressions of emotion can be problematic, even though they’re justified by the “Show, don’t tell” mandate. But there are often better, more artful ways to give us insights into the interiority of your POV characters.
An expert writer of stories needs to have some mastery of psychic distance—the distance the narrator stands from a character’s emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. No matter what viewpoint or person or verb tense you’re using for your story, your narration will sometimes go very close to character perception and sometimes stay quite distant.