Tag: writing as a craft
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10 Best Advice On Writing By Stephen King
Stephen King, for me, is the God of writing. He knows how to create believable characters that will make you feel all kinds of emotions (a wide, wide range of emotions at that), he creates genre-defining works and his stories are simply incomparable to any other on the planet (though I do know a couple…
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5 Tips To Write Great Sentences
Everyone wants to write great prose, but most fo the times they ignore the very thing that makes up the prose itself – sentences! In order to write great prose, you need to be able to write great sentences and in order to write great sentences, first you need to know what kind of sentences…
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Guided Writing Groups – Write With Me
I present to you Guided Writing Groups – 3 Tiers of Exclusive Writing Groups! In all the workshops I’ve conducted and having spoken to over a 100 budding writers, the main problem with each and everyone’s writing, that I have been able to identify so far are two: lack of motivation (or simply not knowing…
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Writing Vlog #2: Writing A Short Story From Scratch
In this video, I have tried to capture my process of writing a short story. If you are a new writer or are curious about how writing is done, then I am sure you’ll enjoy this video. I you are a veteran writer then I am sure you will be able to relate to it…
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7 Types Of Characters In Fiction
Characterisation is one of the most important elements of any story, long or short. If you don’t get the characterisation right, chances are that your story will fall flat on its face and no writer wants that to happen! So the best way to make sure that your story stays with the reader long before…
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Creating Realistic Characters
Creating Realistic Characters is an hour-long webinar on characterisation basics. I will be doing a follow-up Webinar with the advance techniques used for characterisation, so make sure you attend this one. Webinar Details Date: 5th December 2020Time: 11:00 am to 12:00 pm (can go on till 12:30 pm) – Indian Standard Time Platform: YouTube LiveLink to the…
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5 Elements Of Plot In Fiction
Plot, one of the 5 main elements of fiction writing, is a term that confuses many new as well as veteran writers. When it comes to Fiction Writing, there is a big difference in the Story and the Plot. If you want to learn the difference between Story and Plot then read this article: Story…
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Storyboard A Novel in 5 Easy Steps
Storyboarding is a wonderful organising technique, that I feel, is highly underrated when it comes to fiction writing. It is a great tool to plot your novels and to put it all together in a coherent plot-line. I am an intuitive writer but working on multiple long-form fiction projects can be downright scary at times…
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Decoding Horror Genre For Writers
Here’s the live stream of my 5th Webinar: Decoding Horror genre for Writers:
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October Webinars
Hello, dear writers and readers. I am here with some exciting as hell news! I have two upcoming Webinars! Read on to find the details, timings and some extra exciting stuff! Webinar #4: Decoding Horror Genre For Writers In this Webinar I will be covering the following topics: What is Horror Fiction – The basics…
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How To Write A Book Analysis
Analysing a book is too often confused with writing a book review. It is a very common misconception and one that needs to be busted especially if you are planning to become a writer or are one already. A book review is an informal way of sharing one’s thoughts about any book of the reader’s…
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Prompt-Writing
Prompt-writing is one of the best tools for fiction writers. Period. You’ll find various definitions for it on the internet, but for me, it is simply what the name suggests: A topic around which a short piece of fiction is written promptly. Generally, the said piece of fiction is in the range of 100-1000 words…
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Fiction Writing Masterclass
Learn all about my upcoming online writing class and register for it to make it in the first batch of students.
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Finding The Right Idea
I don’t think I have ever known, not even a single writer, who doesn’t get about a dozen ideas every day. But imagine what would happen if you’d start taking all of those ideas seriously? It’ll be chaos! So you get my point? As a beginner, you might feel the need, a very compulsive need,…
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Discovering The Writer Within
The first place you need to begin, especially while starting a long-form fiction project (or re-starting it), is to discover yourself as a writer – to find out what kind of a writer you are. Because unless you do it, you won’t know how to proceed further, especially once the initial flame of anticipation and…
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Character Profile Sheets (CPS) – Part 2
Character Profile Sheets are a great literary tool that help you in profiling your characters, especially the main characters of your story. They not only help you in being consistent with your character’s traits throughout your story or manuscript but also help a great deal in creating as well as painting the character arc you…
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A Comprehensive Look At Literary Devices
As a writer, it becomes a necessity at some point or the other, to understand as many technicalities of the craft as possible. Whether you’re an intuitive writer or a deliberate one, there will be times when you’ll have to break the literary rules in order to create your masterpiece, but in order to do…
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The 4-Act-Structure: Introduction
As almost all the plotters would swear by, outlining a story helps a writer greatly in making sense of the story for the readers. We, as writers, know what our story is and how it plays out, the difficult bit is to put in into words in a systematic way and have it make sense…
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Naming The Writer’s Unconscious – A Little Girl And Her Puppy
I always read craft books not once, but several times. I guess that’s the best way to really get the techniques and the wisdom they have to offer. Lately, I’ve been re-reading Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott and came across a concept, more like a paragraph or two, where author Lamott mentions about naming the unconscious: “My…
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What Is Writer’s Block? And 3 Things to Keep In Mind
There are a lot of people who don’t believe in the existence of Writer’s Block, but let’s face it, even though you don’t want to name it, there are periods of time in every writer’s life when you simply can’t write (no matter how much you want to!) You can call it a “bad phase”,…
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10 Questions To Help You Determine The POV(s) For Your Story
Choosing the main Point Of View(s) for your story is either the simplest or the hardest thing you’ll ever come across while writing your book. Determining the voice which narrates or unfolds your story is a tricky thing because if you select the wrong one your story is doomed. Sometimes (a few precious instances), you…
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Point Of Views (POVs)
Point Of View, casually known as POV, is one of the most important literary devices that is used in fiction writing. Determining the perspective from which the story is told is often the making or the breaking point of a novel. If you make a wrong decision, your readers will be highly disappointed due to…
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Freewriting – Everything You Need To Know
Freewriting is a very important prewriting technique that not only helps you to get over your writer’s block, but also to tap into your sub-conscience mind and see what all ideas and stories are hiding there. Most of the times, we get stuck while writing a story, or an article, and simply don’t know what…
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All About First Drafts
A First Draft is one of the most basic entities of fiction-writing and it lays the basic foundation of a novel. If you’re a writer then you probably might have come across this term more than a thousand times already, and if not then you’ve come to the right place. Just for the sake of…
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Editing Vs Revising
We all are aware of what revising a draft means and what it means to get your manuscript edited, but very few writers really know the real difference between the two. If you’ll ask around, the most common answer is that what we do ourselves is revising and what an editor does is editing. But…
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The 3-Act Structure: In Detail
In order to utilize the 3-Act Structure efficiently, there is a need for a systematic sequence of elements to be followed that carries the story forward. In the 3-Act Structure, each act has some particular story moves and by following these particular set of acts, you can rest easy that there will be no place…
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Character Profile Sheets
Characterisation is one of the most important aspects of writing a book. It is one of the 9 most important elements of Novel Writing. Whether you are working on a short story or a long-form fiction project, you need characters, and that too strong ones. They are the building blocks of your story because they…
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5 Keys To Writing 50K Words In 30 Days
To help other writers who are struggling to get those dreaded 50K words done this NaNoWriMo, I’ve come up with 5 keys that are the most important factors for cracking NaNoWriMo and even to write a good amount of words daily even after NaNo.