Fiction writers care deeply about the characters they bring to life. They think up personalities, quirks and flaws, they romanticize the image, and then they allow the vision of their character to pour forth in words. As writers, we all want characters that come alive on the pages. Characters make or break a story. Get [...]

Are you taking the NaNoWriMo challenge? Then you need to have good characters – and we can help. Why Characters Matter So Much Characters make every story worth reading. Without characters, your readers can’t relate to anyone and you can’t create a mental bond to draw people into your world for a time. Your beautiful [...]

This post is an expansion on a one I wrote during discussion over at our creative writing role-playing game, Escaping Reality. Feel free to drop by the game boards. Writing fiction can be an amazing adventure and a fantastic release from real life. But characters can also create chaos in your life. They’re creatures from [...]

There comes a time in every writer’s life when the words poured onto pages from the heart are ready for the public. Alright, maybe not the whole public, but a private kind of public. Stephen King refers to this in On Writing, and he mentions it as finally opening up the office door to let [...]

Do you want a place to play after a long day at work? Are you looking for a site that lets you release your wild imagination? Would you like to interact with others, use your creative writing talents and improve your fiction skills, dialogue, and quick thinking to be a better writer? We have what [...]

When we released the launch date of our new creative writing role-playing game, the response was fantastic. People were excited, everyone wanted in, and the requests for character sheets kept coming. Some people asked us why we did this – that’s a question deserving an answer. Lovin’ the Fun We love role-playing. It’s been a [...]

Just when I thought I might give up on my feed reader, this little gem of a meme poked its head out. Not only was the post a fun read, but it also looked like an excellent exercise in writing fiction. I don’t do link love often, mainly because James always beats me to it. [...]

We’ve been busy, very busy. Behind the scenes of our daily life, we plot and connive, exploring millions of ideas running through our heads. Like Jekyll and Hyde (or Luke Skywalker and Han Solo), we’ve worked night and day, whispering in hushed tones while we tweak our secret to perfection, gleefully enjoying ourselves as we [...]

Almost all good stories need conflict – and not the epic battle-style of conflict. The conflicts that bring characters alive are the smaller conflicts that occur between two people, a small group and the internal conflicts we deal with on a daily basis. Conflict adds an incredible amount of depth to characters. Without conflict, a [...]

Over the past few weeks in our Fiction Writing series, we’ve covered a lot about characters but very little about the actual nuts and bolts of writing. I’m not a technical kind of guy when it comes to writing. I know what sounds good, I know what looks good and I understand how to write [...]