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In a 2011 survey of published novelists by Writer's Digest, 73% of respondents who used outlines reported that their manuscripts required fewer str...

"I know my character wants revenge. I just don't know if he'd slam the door or walk out quietly." That sentence -- overheard at a writers' conferen...

Most writing advice tells writers to plan more before drafting. Here is the counter-intuitive truth: planning too much is almost as dangerous as no...

A study of 2,000 published novels found that stories with clearly defined character arcs received, on average, 40% higher reader satisfaction score...

Most writers stall at the exact same place. They've got their one-sentence summary -- tight, punchy, the story in a nutshell. Then someone says "ex...

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Einstein was talking about physics, but the principle cuts straight to the h...

The worst thing that can happen to a novel isn't rejection. It's never leaving the writer's hard drive. Ninety-seven percent of people who start w...

Three readers said the pacing in chapter seven was too slow. A fourth said the protagonist's decision in the climax made no sense. A fifth -- the o...

In 2013, a team of cognitive scientists at the University of Liverpool ran an experiment that should worry every writer alive. They gave authors th...

Most writers believe revision means reading through the manuscript once, catching typos, smoothing clunky sentences, and calling it done. The truth...

"I know there are problems in it. I just can't see them yet. But when I come back, those problems will be clear -- like finding a body in an otherw...

Three months of preparation, and the blank document is still blank. The protagonist has a name, a backstory, a wound that drives everything. The w...

Every year, over 300,000 people sign up for NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- determined to write an entire novel in November. Fewer tha...

The Physical Layer: What Your World Looks LikeMost writing advice says world-building comes first. Design the map, invent the history, codify the m...

Why Does the Snowflake Method Work?"I used to be a seat-of-the-pants writer," physicist-turned-novelist Randy Ingermanson once admitted. "Then I wr...

His Desk, His DungeonThree months into writing your novel, you've got forty pages. Good pages, even. Then life gets loud -- a deadline at work, a f...

External Want: What Your Character ChasesIn 1936, Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind. Eighty-eight years later, people still argue abou...

Most writing advice tells you to start with an outline. Build the skeleton, then add the flesh. Plan your ending before you write your beginning. ...

"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story." Frank Herbert said that, and he was talking about Dune -- a novel that use...