Writing Roots

No story is complete without an antagonist. They don’t need to be the classic, mustache-twirling villain, but there needs to be some point of conflict for the main characters. The best way to do that is through setting up a character to be their antithesis. A good villain comes with a few key characteristics. They need to have a reason for their villainy, a reasonable backstory, and some kind of t...

Writing is a difficult journey. Not every story will come easily and quickly. Sometimes it’s a fight to get the words onto the page. This is why it’s important for writers to know when to stop. There will be times when putting aside a story is actually the best thing to do. You may return to it, or you may not. Either is fine. But there is no benefit to pushing through a story you aren’t enjoying....

Are you a good writer? This is a topic we wanted to revisit because it’s a question that revisits every writer through their career. There is always doubt and question about skill level, whether the writing is good or interesting, and the constant habit of comparing to best-selling novels. It is unfortunate that often the better we are, the worse we feel about our skill. In this episode, our hosts...

Comedy is an essential part of most writing. Even if you aren’t focusing on it as a genre, some humor can go a long way in helping readers enjoy your book even more. We decided to take a second look at this topic (well, technically third, since there were two previous episodes about it). In this new episode, we take a deeper look at what humor is, and the ingredient to help craft the perfect momen...

Humans like the number three. Political, religious, societal, and even superstitious structures are often divided into threes. It’s the smallest number needed to establish a pattern that can be broken. You want to keep three in mind while writing. Not only can it be fundamental to your story structure, but even to your sentence structures. In this episode, Ley and Leigh take another look at the ru...

Book titles are vital for sales. A title that’s too generic won’t catch a reader’s attention. A title that’s too far from the genre trends will mislead and draw in the wrong readers. A boring title won’t draw in any readers. Continuing our redo series, we’re taking a closer look at how to name a book. Our hosts look at what works, what to keep in mind, and the best practices for finding a title th...

Pennames are a hot topic in the writing world. There are a lot of reasons to have one, but just as many to use your own name. The name you publish under is your brand. It’s important to remember that if you want to build a following that will read your content across multiple books. Stephen King, using a penname (Richard Bachman) was proving he could be successful without relying on his public ima...

Plotting or pantsing? It’s a question of how you decide to take on your writing project. Are you more of an architect who builds out a story before you write it, or are you a gardener who cultivates the story as it grows? Knowing which style best suits you can help you maximize your writing adventures. When we started this podcast, Leigh was a pantser, while Ley was a plotter. In the last few year...

Writing is a never-ending learning process. In the three years since we started this podcast, we at Writing Roots have grown in our individual writing journeys. That also means that we know a lot more now than we did when we started. To celebrate our anniversary and starting our fourth year, we decided to take a look at some of those old episodes and see what we could improve with our new knowledg...

You’re nearing the end of the story. You need something to tie all of the threads together which you’ve woven through the pages. What better way to explain why everything happened than to have your villain say it? There are lots of better ways. Trust us. The villain monologue has long been a staple of action novels and spy stories. It’s a neat way to explain the motivation for everything the villa...

Just because you have a character say it doesn’t mean you’re actually avoiding exposition. In some ways, having a character share backstory information through dialogue can be more annoying than helpful. That’s not to say you should avoid it entirely. You should, however, be aware of the main three problems that come with info dumping in dialogue. The first problem is that the person your characte...

There may come a time in your writing where you simply can’t avoid the exposition. Some piece of history may need to be explained, or you need to discuss the magic and what’s possible. The trick is to do it in such a way that makes the reader want it, which then helps them not even realize it’s an info dump. When you need to explain some bit of the story, you should still keep it short. Keep it re...

Backstory is a wonderful thing that will help make your characters feel rich and developed. Authors need to at least know the important events that led a character to where they are when the story begins. Those pieces of history can help readers empathize with the plights of your characters. Too much of a good thing, though, is a terrible thing. When it comes to backstory, introducing it in small...

One of the fastest ways to pull a reader out of the narrative flow of your story is to inundate them with descriptions. This is especially the case when you do paragraph descriptions of the point-of-view character. No one wants an info dump of what a character looks like. Not unless it’s attached to emotion in some way. This is where showing becomes incredibly important. If you’re trying to introd...

Every character has skills. Every character learns new skills. The question is, how do we – as authors – show that? The reader needs to know that this character knows other languages, or can fight, or is the fastest crocheter in the west. Do we just give the fact a paragraph and move on? Never. Instead, let it bleed into the character. Their words, their choices, their jokes, their enemies. Every...

When you’ve spent time and effort creating a magic system for your story, you naturally want people to know just how awesome it really is. The magic is, after all, one of the major elements that draws people into their love of the fantasy genre. Even if we’ve spent hours and hours crafting each piece, each spell, each category, the chances that the reader needs to know everything is incredibly low...

It would be impossible to show every aspect of a culture within a story. Whether you’re representing a real culture or creating a fictional one, there are too many facets to fully display. You may be excited about it and want to show it to the world, but that leads you quickly into the trap of exposition and information dumping. There are easy ways to show the beauty of your story’s cultures witho...

The history of a world, especially when you’re writing science fiction and fantasy, tends to play a large part in the story overall. It is, after all, the history of the world that put the characters where they are when the story begins. Much like when discussing the political balance in your world, discussing its history is a dangerous path. New authors tend to want to explain it all up front so...

Exposition – also known as information dumping – can drag a story down more effectively than any other form of bad writing. When you spend too much time explaining a detail to the reader, they are pulled from the story or lost in the mire of unnecessary details. It boils down to telling instead of showing the story. One of the most common things to be explained in an info dump is the political str...

Misunderstandings happen. Sometimes it’s the reader skimming too fast and missing a detail. Sometimes it’s the author who named two characters too similarly. There’s not much you can do about the first problem, but you can take steps to minimize the opportunity for misunderstandings. In this episode, Ley and Leigh discuss some of the most common times for a reader to get confused in a story and wh...

Emotions are complicated, difficult things that tie humanity together or break them apart. Emotions are what keep readers invested in stories. Readers will care about the characters and what they experience. Good authors know how to tap into the right emotions to make that happen. It is too easy to accidentally evoke the wrong emotions. That can happen in a variety of ways, from an unsympathetic m...

Content and trigger warnings are becoming increasingly obvious throughout our daily lives. Warnings in the form of ratings have been around for a while on movies, shows, and video games. They’re becoming increasingly popular to include in fanfiction and online writing forums. We even use them on our podcast when we’re going to be discussing more sensitive issues. However, there’s a strong debate i...

Readers are fully aware that they’re reading a book. However, for just a moment, they pretend they’re inside the story, that they are the characters going on this adventure. Breaking that bubble (also known as suspension of disbelief) can be dangerous because it reminds the reader they are not inside the story, but observing it. At other times, authors charge forward and brazenly shatter the fourt...

Readers have come to expect certain things from books, including certain tropes and clichés that help establish pieces of the story within a line or two. We’ve talked before about how you can use cookie-cutter representations of tertiary characters so you don’t spend a lot of time describing someone who never reappears. The same thing can work in small ways with your main characters. You don’t hav...

Meme culture has given us plenty of names with strong stereotype associations. Karen, Chad, and Kyle, for example. As an author, it’s good to keep in mind that there’s a reason these names grew into memes. It’s because people naturally associate certain ideas and emotions with different names, and even individual sounds. When you are choosing what to name characters, you’ll want to consider the as...