Ayesha’s Power-Up for Writers
The Blurry Lines of Age Categories
Age categories are an essential part of the publishing process, yet the least talked about. Often, the term "age category" gets lost inside conversations about genre: You got romance, you got historical fiction, you got picture books and you got young adult fiction....
We Don’t Talk About Bias
Bias is a loaded word anywhere, but especially for writers. No matter what we write, our job is to create an entire world for our characters. We don't want to repeat patterns in our fiction that we dislike in real life. But doing so seems prohibitive. My...
Revising Through the Climactic Scene
Last year I was asked to offer some revision advice for the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast (listen to the episode here). As I thought about it, I realized the key to my revision process is the climactic scene. To be quite honest with you, the first...
Characters Are Your Friends
As a new writer, I read a lot of articles about how to create characters yet none of them proved helpful to me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get through the numerous questions on character sheets or figure out what my character had on their bedside table and...
What Theatre Classes Taught Me About Dialogue
Sometimes, you can learn more about writing techniques when learning other subjects. I learned a lot more about dialogue taking a theatre class than I ever did in a writing workshop or craft book. When I went back to university in my mid-twenties, I decided to...
My Experience Writing First Person
Every writer has defaults when it comes to storytelling. Mine include writing in third person, outlining my novel ahead of time, and setting my story in a fantasy world. However, when I came up with the idea for my current work-in-progress, it demanded that I forego...
Worldbuilding your Contemporary Setting
Setting is an important part of storytelling. The environment a story takes place in changes how it's told, what the characters are able to do, and a whole host of other small decision a writer makes. For example, a story set at a fantasy academy will have very...
Let’s write Immigrant Characters
Hey friends. We have come to the last part of the series on writing immigrant characters. In part 1, we explored research as a decision-making tool and honed in on some vital details about our immigrant characters. In part 2, we explored the "heavier" topic of...
Let’s Research Immigrant Characters
In last month’s post, we began our exploration of writing immigrant characters. We talked about how research can be used as a decision-making tool, and some of the choices to make for your characters. Today, we're going to get into some of the heavier, yet important,...
Let’s Celebrate Immigrant Characters
In Western countries, December is the month of holidays. When I think about winter holidays, I think about movement—people driving across county lines to visit family, religious historical figures migrating to make change, new holidays moving into public...
Ready to power up?
email: info@powerupwriting.com