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

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 tend to overthink things. So when I attended a talk on character archetypes at the Young Writer Retreat, I was extremely grateful for...

Let me start by saying this is not an exhaustive list. It would probably be impossible to make a list of all the ways to improve a plot,...

I recently finished reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and I have to admit it was not my kind of novel. I almost stopped reading it...