Ayesha’s Power-Up for Writers
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...
Artist Self and Reader Self
Whenever I pick up a book or sit down to watch a movie, my brain splits into two realms of consciousness. One is my artist self: the person who picks apart the story, analyzes how successful each piece is, and sometimes comes up with how to improve it. The other is my...
The Power of Choice
Having a choice is really important to us in our every day life. We want the freedom to choose what we do, where we go, who our friends are. But when it comes to writing stories, it's very tempting to sacrifice that power of choice in favor of possibility. The purpose...
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