For readers to care what happens next in your story, they must first care about your characters. It’s your job as a writer to foster this reader-character connection, to build the bridge that encourages readers to invest in your characters’ stories. Establishing your characters’ motivations isn’t the only way to encourage this reader-character connection, but it is a surefire way to lend context to your characters’ actions. With context in place, readers can then decide whether your characters and their journeys are worth their emotional investment.

You can spend months crafting the perfect novel for your audience, only for it to sell poorly because you haven’t taken your metadata seriously. It may not be fair, but it’s true--the metadata for your eBook can make or break your sales.  But what is metadata? Here’s a list of what it includes:  1. Book title 2. Subtitle 3. Series information 4. Description 5. Author 6. Contributors 7. Publisher 8. Keywords 9. Category You enter all of these metadata elements when you’re publishing your book.

If you write short fiction, submitting to literary magazines is a great way to find an audience. But with thousands of magazines to choose from, submissions might feel intimidating. Don't know where to begin? Or even what to think about when submitting to litmags? This guide breaks down the big considerations as you delve into the world of submissions.

To fill our stories with characters who feel as real as the people around us, we must delve deeper than classic archetypes and easy characterizations. This work begins with developing richly complex personalities for our characters that lend to their most vibrant portrayals. Discover my favorite personality-building tool today >>

At the heart of every good story is conflict.

In plot-driven stories, this conflict is primarily external in nature. The protagonist fights to overcome a series of obstacles and/or defeat an antagonist in their quest to achieve a particular goal. For example, in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must outlive her fellow competitors and outsmart the game-makers’ vicious whims to survive a televised fight to the death.

However, in character-driven stories, external conflict often takes a back seat. Instead, it’s internal conflict that drives the story forward as the protagonist struggles to overcome a core fear or flaw to achieve a particular goal and/or become a better version of themselves. This fear or flaw often manifests in a false belief that’s otherwise known as the “lie” your character believes. It’s this lie that we’re going to explore in detail today.

A step outline is more than just another pre-writing technique. It's an active document that can help you hone your novel at every stage of the writing process. Author and editor Mel Lee-Smith explains in this article for the Well-Storied blog!

It’s no secret that social media can be both an incredible tool and an incredible distraction.

Unfortunately, that distraction isn’t limited to the amount of time we spend mindlessly scrolling. Maintaining an active social media presence can also eat away at the limited amount of time most writers have to dedicate to their work. It’s no wonder I’m often asked how one can balance writing and social media marketing, or even whether writers must have a social presence in the first place. It’s the latter question I’d like to address in depth today.

I worked on my thriller, Murderabilia, for years. Imagine my surprise when the TV show, “The Prodigal Son,” aired in September with a nearly identical premise. In my book and the show, the son of a serial killer has not seen his imprisoned father since he was a boy. Many years later, someone commits a murder that looks just the way his father would do it. The police need the protagonist to work with his father to find the copycat killer. Had someone borrowed my work?

Are you tired of jumping from distraction to distraction when trying to write? Perhaps this isn't a problem you need to solve but rather an element of your creative process worth embracing. Author Autumn Krause explains…

External conflict often plays a major role in genre fiction, forming the foundation for a story’s plot as the protagonist struggles to achieve their goal in the face of opposition. As such, many genre fiction writers spend a considerable amount of time developing their story’s plot arcs while giving little thought to an equally powerful story element: character arcs.

As writers, we hold the power to counteract marginalization and discrimination in literature by writing inclusively. When we actively work to improve the quality and diversity of the representation in our stories, we help dismantle the social hierarchy, expand our readers’ worldview, and ultimately ensure that every reader can see themselves in the pages of their favorite books.

We’ve already discussed how the events that took place in your characters’ pasts should affect who they are when your story begins. Backstory gives your characters a sense of history, of lives that extend beyond the confines of the story you’re telling, ultimately helping readers view your characters as fully-realized. Backstory can even provide insight into your characters’ beliefs, worldviews, and motivations—all vital characterization elements that should affect the way your characters act and the decisions they make throughout your story.

As you can see, taking care to develop your characters’ backstories is essential to your story’s success. Today, I’d like to take an even deeper dive into backstory, exploring the aspect of your characters’ past that is perhaps most essential of all: their ghost.