In 2024, I joined the Young Writer’s Workshop, an amazing platform and resource for young writers. One of the main pieces of advice they give for starting a writing career is to stay home from college and focus on writing. That way, you save money on a degree and have more time to work on getting published. This strategy will work well for some writers, but as a writer currently in college, I’ve been reflecting on how my time here has been working for my writing career. My ho

Have you ever read a line of dialogue that just felt off? Grammatically, it was correct, but it didn’t sound right. Chances are, it was breaking a maxim of conversation.             These unspoken rules of dialogue are used every day in the real world, governing what it means to speak properly and creating an uncanny valley affect when broken. You probably already know these maxims intuitively, but being able to put them into words will help you understand why dialogue may so

In honor of Halloween this year, my friends and I watched the movie Coraline . Since I’ve been learning how to write middle grade, I was extremely interested in how they presented the relationship between Coraline and her parents. One of the hallmarks of good middle grade fiction is when the disconnect between the adult and child perspectives is present, but the reader is able to understand and sympathize with both. A lot of writers would have taken a plot like Coraline and

I’ve never been one to put a lot of thought into what POV to use for a story. That said, Lauren Hildebrand’s talk on choosing point of view was one of the retreat sessions I was least excited for, but I figured it would be a good refresher on the basics. I was pleasantly surprised by how Lauren addressed the different effects each POV can have on a story, including the reader experience and the different literary devices available to each. Ultimately, Lauren got me thinking

I recently reread the second part of Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell to get some guidance on how to proceed with rewriting The Everstone....