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  Guest Blogger: A Day in the Life of a Fantasy Character and its Creator by Ian Alexander

  4542 readers A Day in the Life of a Fantasy Character and its Creator By Ian Alexander, author of the bestselling epic fantasy novel Once We Were Kings. Life is no picnic if you’re the character in an epic fantasy book.  It’s full of conflict, challenges, disappointments and the occasional pesky dragon.  But despite the difficulties, there are wonderful

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  Cemetery Gates: Developing a Plot

  2053 readersby Todd RutherfordPlot development is an area that many first time writers ignore. They have a story inside them that needs to come out and it is all too easy to make this the focus, instead of creating a plot that has a firm beginning, middle and end....

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  What Are the Seeds of Your Story?

  2031 readersUnless you’re highly gifted, the stories you write aren’t likely to just fall out of your brain and land intact on the page in front of you. Instead, we writers have a tendency to start with just one small story element. A seed. From there, all the other necessary bits and pieces evolve until we have

• The ABCs (and Ds and Es) of Plot Development

  2970 readersPlot develops out of conflict, either external, such as a person or an event that precipitates a series of actions the main character undertakes, or internal, driven by the protagonist’s wants and/or needs. Original Post: The ABCs (and Ds and Es) of Plot Development Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.

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  Where’s Your Conflict?

  5159 readersYou may have had the experience of picking up a book or an article and being bored silly without quite knowing why. The content is certainly interesting. You can see how it could be a fascinating story or subject. But somehow, inexorably, you begin to yawn. What happened here? The book had potential! How did it

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  Learn to Write Conflict in Children’s Books

  2193 readersBy Lisa BrunelIf you want to learn to write children's books, you should absolutely start by reading some of them, this is because after you have read a few, there are a few things that snap into focus. The first thing that you will likely notice is th...

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  Lying About People: Developing Fictional Characters

  2151 readersby Todd RutherfordCharacter development is one of the main keys to writing a successful novel. If your characters are not believable and well rounded, your readers will not be able to keep their interest in your story. This is true whether your story i...

• How to Motivate Your Characters

  2008 readersYou are like unto a god, because you have the omnipotence to create literary characters. But as we all know from watching Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. This is the greatest of yours. Original Post: How to Motivate Your Characters Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.

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  Why, Oh Why?

  2193 readersKath here. Today’s guest is historical fantasy novelist Jules Watson. You may remember Jules from her interview with valued WU contributor Anna Elliott about writing historical fantasy. Jules kindly returned to WU to provide more inspiration and motivation to writers in the growing historical fantasy market.  Jules’s new book THE RAVEN QUEEN, a mystical story set in ancient Ireland,

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  From Bodkins to Back-Stabbing: Elizabeth Loupas on Spiking Your Novel with Conflict

  2616 readers “He murdered his first duchess with his own hands, they say,” the Ferrarese hairdressing-woman whispered as she braided a string of pearls into my hair. “She was so young, so beautiful.” And I, Barbara of Austria, neither young nor beautiful, would be the duke’s second duchess before the pale December sun set. What did the woman