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Using Music to Mine Your Emotions

If you consider yourself an unemotional person, you might wonder how you can become an emotional master in your writing. The secret? Music.

A Complete Guide to Writing Incredible Novel Openings

What are the most important things to include in your opening chapter? Establish your setting. Introduce elements of your protagonists conflict. Raise important story questions. Make your reader care about your character. Read on to find out more!

How to Foreshadow like Alfred Hitchcock

Foreshadowing allows you to plant clues, hint at what’s to come, build the tension, or even place a red herring in your reader’s path. You can use foreshadowing in a variety of ways. The resulting action can be immediate or delayed. You can use dialogue or narrative to set the scene, and you can foreshadow a symbolic event or an ethical dilemma. You can use direct or indirect foreshadowing, and it can even be true or false. Foreshadowing can feed the tension of a scene. Who doesn’t know the famous shower scene in the movie Psycho? Right before the character Marion Crane pulls up to the Bates Motel, her windshield wipers are slashing through the rain, foreshadowing what awaits her in the shower scene.

The Nitty Gritty Practical Guide to Giving your Characters Unique Voice

Character Voice is as difficult to pin down as it is critical. Plenty of writing advice resources talk about the importance of your main characters each having a unique voice, but how do you achieve that? The main problem is that all of those characters are essentially coming from the same mind – yours – so you need to find ways to ensure your personal characteristics, speech patterns and nuances don’t all bleed into your characters.

How to Create Famous (and Infamous) Characters in Fiction

Want to write famous and infamous characters? Want to make them feel lifelike? In this article, writer Kathy Edens offers several helpful tips on how to do it.

Writing Technology Reviews: the Character Builder by One Stop for Writers

Do you struggle to build three-dimensional characters? One Stop for Writers have a new tool that just might help you create the next best-seller. Read all about it!

Make Readers Fall In Love with Characters, Not Plots

Channel the power of empathy to connect your readers with your story. Use your main character's vulnerability, disadvantage and context to get your reader to love them.

5 Tricks for Using Dialogue to Write Truly Captivating Characters

Dialogue can be about much more than just the words on the page. Good authors use it to build tension and subtly set the tone of each interaction. The words their characters choose say so much more than just their lexical meaning. So how you can use dialogue to create captivating characters and move your story forward? Here are 5 tricks.

The 10 Best Facebook Groups for Writers

What are some of the best Facebook groups for writers? Here's our top 10 list.

How to Write a Mind-Blowing Plot Twist Like Gone Girl

As an author, don’t you want to create the mind-blowing plot twist that leaves readers begging you to write more books? Maybe the kind that result in big movie deals… Wait. If your writing is a means to an end, it’s doubtful your plot twist will make the big bang needed to get on the big screen. Because you can’t force a plot twist; readers will smell it a mile away. Do it authentically and you’ll create a feverish tension that keeps readers turning the pages to see how this new twist will play out next. Or you’ll end on a final piece of information that changes everything, resonating with readers long after the last page. Here’s how it works.

Do You Know the Most Important Role of Your Supporting Characters?

Supporting characters are designed to move your story forward. Discover their relationship to story context and how that influences the way you write them.

Kill the Thought Verbs! Get Readers Involved

Verbs like "know," "remember," and "imagine" are thought verbs that happen inside a character’s head. They slow the story down. Learn how to replace them with action and detail.

How to Use Trello to Storyboard Your Novel

You may have noticed that we at ProWritingAid have a fondness for technology that makes writers better, stronger, more organized, and highly productive. If you like creating a storyboard for your novels, or if you want an innovative app to capture all of your to-do’s for your client work, let us introduce Trello. For those of us who use sticky notes, index cards, and other forms of reminders to help you organize everything you need for a writing project, Trello is the easiest, most intuitive way to organize your work.

Are You Writing a Villain or an Antagonist?

Know the difference between antagonist and villain. Read this article for tips on how to use them in your story to create obstacles for your protagonist and build tension for your reader.

How to Use Satire like Mark Twain

Writers who use satire to get their point across do so by wielding humor, wit, irony, or sarcasm. They expose an individual or society for its weaknesses, corruption, hypocrisy, or foolishness. And no one does it better than Mark Twain.

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