Writing Roots

Few things are more damaging to the writing community than this thought. Other authors are your competition. Not only is that incorrect, it creates unnecessary animosity in place of a supportive system where we can build each other – and our books – up in the eyes of the readers. It is unfortunate that this idea remains pervasive. It comes from the mislead idea that readers will remain loyal to on...

One piece of common bad advice we see among authors is the suggestion that by writing detailed dark topics, the author is glorifying it. They suggest that writing racist characters must mean the author is racist, or that being able to write such evil, the author must spend a lot of time fantasizing about it. That simply isn’t true. The reason this piece of advice is bad is because it leads to lack...

There are few pieces of advise worse than this one. There is a misconception that to be a truly good author, you don’t need a second draft, that your first draft will be perfect and ready for publishing. Unfortunately, many new authors will then use these first drafts to either query agents and publishers, or they will immediately self-publish their book. This has led to a misconception about self...

Writers get bad advice all of the time. Often, it’s the same pieces of bad advice heard again and again and again. Why, though? If it’s bad, why do so many people still repeat the same old refrains? Mostly, because it starts from someone who found what worked for them. Just like clothing, writing is not one-style-fits-all. Each person will need to find their own path. This month, our hosts are tak...

Supernatural curses have been a large part of storytelling for centuries, if not millennia. Many of us grew up on tales of curses because of Disney movies. They’re also present in tales like The Mummy and Pirates of the Caribbean. In each example, there is someone using supernatural forces to cause harm to another person or group of people. History itself is also filled with tales of curses, from...

Researchers in 2002 coined the phrase The Dark Triad to describe three main personality traits that share often malevolent aspects: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Those with two or three of these traits often manipulate, lie, abuse, and undermine the people around them, while often appearing charming and charismatic. Many serial killers are among those who fall into this dark triad...

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), while not understood well in the world of psychology, has been explored in fiction for a long time. Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, DID is a mental health condition where someone has more than one distinct personality which control their behavior. One of the best classical examples, even if it was caused by a potion, is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a common element when writing fiction. Authors are known to put their characters through traumatic events or to give them traumatic backstories. It’s likely that your characters hasn’t made it through life without some event that could have caused them to experience PTSD. The difficult part, then, is writing the disorder accurately. The most common eleme...

Imprisonment has a major effect on the minds of both the captives and the captors, which is important to remember when including this theme in your story. Not only are there plenty of fictional works which tell the tale of a prisoner and their life after release or escape, such as The Count of Monte Cristo or Les Misérables, but this idea of captivity is used as a subplot in many other stories. Wh...

If you’re writing a thriller with a caretaker character, you may consider Munchausen Syndrome as a plot device. It’s when someone either pretends to be ill or even makes themselves ill in order to garner attention. This psychological disorder has been seen in several works of fiction, including The Sixth Sense, Supernatural, and even in It. In this cases, as is true for most cases used in fiction,...

Of all the topics we’ll talk about this month, brainwashing is the one with the least basis in reality. Certainly, brainwashing is absolutely a real technique and has been used in many wars and even cults. However, when most people think of this kind of mental manipulation, they think of various shows or books. They’ll think of something like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the keyphrases...

When you’re building a backstory for your main character, it’s likely that you’ll include an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). Psychologists with the Centers for Disease Control have determined a list of ten things which qualify as an ACE, which can contribute to problems with mental health as an adult. The unique part of an ACE is that it is usually an accumulation of experiences rather than a...

One of the more common types of abuse in fiction is a form of domestic abuse. It can range from physical or verbal, to psychological or financial. For many victims, abuse causes drastic changes in their daily lives, usually over time. An abuser will start slowly and with small things, until the victim no longer believes they can leave. This episode is focused on discussing the psychology of both t...

The human mind can be a dark and scary place, capable of much more evil than most people would even consider possible. As writers, we have a unique kind of permission to explore those dark crevices and bring them into the light of day. It can be the source of great inspiration not only for your villain, but for your storyline in general. Unfortunately, because many of these darker aspects of human...

Few things throw readers off in a book like characters or objects suddenly teleporting in middle of a scene. We’re not talking about actual teleportation, which is more than plausible within fiction. We’re talking about blocking – a term borrowed from theater, used to describe the scripted motions of each actor with each other and with their surroundings. Bad blocking is when the author accidental...

If you’ve been listening long enough, you’ve heard us tell you that clichés are a good thing. When applied correctly, they can help provide a framework for a character and even your plot as a whole. However, there is a fine line to tread between using these known elements to begin building your story, and using them to the point where it is just cliché. The most egregious use of a bad framework fo...

The last thing any reader wants is to be distracted while they’re reading. There are memes galore about it. What’s worse than someone deciding to talk to you as soon as you start reading, is the book itself becoming a distraction from the story. Many things can cause this, but it usually comes down to one thing: bad writing. Anything from misspelled words and incorrect punctuation to words picked...

In media res is a common phrase used to describe how to start a story or scene. It means to get into the action quickly, to what really matters right away. This one thing can make or break a book. If a narrative starts too slowly, or is otherwise lacking some kind of interesting hook at the beginning, readers are not likely to keep going. Many readers use the first page or two as a gauge for wheth...

When we talk about main characters being annoying, we aren’t referring to their personality traits which may be annoying in a real person. For readers, an annoying main character is often one who is unrealistic. Whether that’s because the author has created a Mary Sue/Gary Stu, or because they keep waving the magical wand of “because the author said so.” Characters don’t have to be perfect (actual...

Few things are more annoying than when a character makes a bad decision. We’re not talking about ones which are bad within the context of the world and the story. All characters need to make a bad decision or two in order to keep the plot moving and interesting. We’re talking about the decisions that don’t make sense for that character. An assassin who has to show off her skills at every turn to p...

It’s no secret that people turn to books to find an escape from the reality of the world. It’s why fantasy and science fiction are so popular. Even books outside those genres often include one impossible thing which the readers simply accept as being part of the tale. That acceptance, however, is limited. If you begin to include to many unrelated impossible things, readers start to look elsewhere...

Plot points set up within a story need to be resolved. That’s pretty straightforward, right? That, however, is not how it turns out for a lot of new authors, especially pantsers (or discovery writers). Sometimes we find ourselves including interesting tidbits that the reader thinks will play an important part in the story, but then it never actually comes back into play. Maybe the character discov...

Start too slow and you bore the reader. Start too quickly and you confuse them. Finding the right balance for the start of your story is essential. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly difficult. There are many ways you can start off a story in the wrong way. You can make it cliché, use a flashback, or throw them into action without context. The list goes on and on and on. We talk about some of the...

There are a few red flags in writing that will cause nearly all readers to set down a book and never pick it up again. It can range from something as simple as bad grammar and punctuation, to problems with the characters. One of the more common problems, especially among new authors, is a lack of consistency in who is telling the story. Changing the point-of-view character is common enough in fict...

The path to publishing a book is never the same for different authors. It varies widely depending on the author, their genre, the book itself, and often the connections the author has to the publishing world. The two main options are self-publishing (also known as indie publishing) and traditional publishing. Neither is better than the other, especially in today’s world where easy access has broke...