Writing Roots

Today’s FAQ is all about descriptions, especially character descriptions. It’s difficult to find the balance between enough description to actually give readers a mental image of what’s happening, and inundating them with three pages about a tree. Descriptions are vital for a story. They immerse readers into the world, and help make characters real. Just think of all the fan art of popular books o...

Short stories are a wonderful way to practice all kinds of writing techniques. Writers can use short stories to explore ideas, work on weaknesses, and try new techniques. You’ll also find that most awards are given based on short story competitions. That doesn’t mean that short stories are easier. They are still a challenge in their own way. Writers often have big ideas. We want to fill pages and...

There is no faster way to convey a sense of uncertainty than including hedging and crippling language in your writing. Words have power, meaning, and convey more than just the definitions. Choosing to write in certain ways will weaken what your saying, thus weakening your message. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify those words as the author. You might have heard these in classes on pub...

Language can be fun. It’s not always the dry, boring material you learned in school. Those are important for fundamentals, but when you learn to play with language, you reveal new potential in writing. Because english is a strange combination of several different language, there are lots of opportunities for wordplay. Just look at Shakespeare’s writing. There are puns galore. Same with authors suc...

One key to good writing is to accepting that sometimes, you’ll need to leave things out entirely. This is often based not on any hard and fast rules, but on instinct. We can’t teach instinct, but we can help you identify those moments when they happen. Most often, the things that need to be left out leave a manuscript feeling awkward or bulky. Sometimes you need to leave the comma out, even if the...

The sentence is the core of writing. While every language has different requirements on what makes a sentence, they all usually share common threads. Complete sentences need a subject and a verb. A thing doing something. That simple construction is the foundation for all the world’s best stories. To write, you need to know what makes a sentence. Not all of what we create will be crafted of the per...

A phrase is one of the basic elements of a sentence. Without knowing the different kinds of phrases and what they do, sentences can feel disjointed. Phrases often dictate comma placement or flow. In this episode, Ley and Leigh break down the different kinds of phrases, from introductory to prepositional, and when a phrase can be a sentence all its own. First aired November 18, 2021. The post S26E6...

Commas. They’re a problem. It can be difficult to remember where commas should be and, more importantly, where they shouldn’t be in a sentence. New writers often hear the suggestion to put a comma wherever feels natural. Stephen King even recently tweeted , “If you hear a pause in your head, the comma goes in (see what I did there?). If you don’t you don’t.” While that can work at times, it is als...

Language is made up of so many different pieces. Often, you use them instinctively because it’s what you grew up learning. To write, however, you should become more familiar with all the different parts of speech and how they should be used. Knowing that, then, will help you break the rules when necessary. This is the second part of our episodes about parts of speech. To listen to part one, click...

No one can be a good writer without knowing the basics of the language in which they write. You may have learned terms like nouns and adverbs in school, but its quite possible you’ve forgotten what they actually mean or how they should interact. Maybe you’re still learning, as all writers are. That’s why we’re taking two episodes to break down the parts of speech within the english language. In th...

When someone talks about the formatting of a book, there are many different things this could mean. They could be talking about the final book format, or the manuscript formatting requirements. Those are fairly simple, though. Some of the more difficult formatting comes from the writing requirements most often encountered in professional and academic environments. In this episode, we discuss the d...

As a writer, you should be striving to become a student of language. This doesn’t mean becoming a polyglot, but learning to love the study of the language you use to write. It is vital to know the rules of a language in order to become a good writer, because it is only then that you can really know how to properly break the rules. If you’re writing in english, you’re not going to follow all of the...

Finishing a book is probably the most difficult part of the writing process. Editing can be daunting and publishing simply overwhelming, but none of that can even happen if you never reach the end. This is an especially important goal as we enter National Novel Writing Month, where people across the country (and now across the world) attempt to write 50,000 words in one month. That’s the minimum s...

Building a brand around yourself as an author is a key element of successful marketing. This is even more important if you plant to write several books or different series. Having an author brand is how you can lead people to all of your books, not just the most successful ones. A brand is what people perceive as being you. When it comes to retail and large companies, this is often a symbol that c...

Publishing can be a daunting process, especially if you’re a new author and unsure what comes after finishing that manuscript. You may be looking at is and asking yourself “what now?” Do you self-publish, or pursue traditional publishing? What about the title and the cover and the formatting? Even once you’ve decided those things, it’s not the end. There is more to publishing than just getting the...

If you think about your favorite books, they’re probably not standalone novels. Many of todays books, especially in fantasy and sci-fi settings, are part of a set. Writing a series, though, can be difficult work. Not only do you need to consider the plot of a single book, but the plot that will connect all of them. This, of course, doesn’t always apply. If you’re writing an episodic series, such a...

Story would not be the same without multiple characters. You often need a villain and at least one supporting character. In some genres, especially epic fantasy and science fiction, there will be at least a dozen prominent supporting characters. There are even some cases where the supporting characters are almost main characters of their own. It’s important, then, to consider how all of these supp...

Stories could not exist without some form of character. Especially in the Hero’s Journey, it is the main character who drives the story forward. Readers connect better to the story when it is about the people inside the pages. That’s why one of the first things any author should build is their main character. While some authors don’t plan their characters down to every last detail, others will lis...

Worldbuilding is one of those things that we at Writing Roots (especially Leigh) can talk about for a very, very long time. There is so much that goes into the process of creating the world of a book, even if that book is based in modern Earth. You need to consider things like the history of the place and culture, the languages, and the geography. If you create a magic system or have advanced tech...

One of the most common types of structures, especially in fantasy writing, is the Hero’s Journey. It’s why we’ve talked about it as much as we have over the course of this podcast. As we get further into Preptober, getting ready for National Novel Writing Month, one thing we suggest is to plan out the story you want to write. Yes, even you pantsers can benefit from having an idea of how your story...

We are one month away from National Novel Writing Month. October, sometimes known in writing circles as Preptober, is the time to start planning for trying to write 50,000 words in one month. Before you can do any writing, you need some kind of idea. Something needs to stir your imagination so you can create wonderful worlds and characters. Leigh, the pantser, is using the month to get into a habi...

Whether it’s a dystopian or utopian outlook, humans have been looking towards the future for almost all of history. The reason for painting on cave walls was to teach future generations. The reason we record current events is to make sure those to come know what happened in their past. The thing with the future, though, is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s what makes it a perfect s...

What is a superhero? Do they have to have superpowers of some kind? Did their origins have to be tragic? Are characters superheroes only because they started in comic books? No matter the answers, superheroes have become a massive piece of the storytelling world in recent years. We can largely thank the Marvel Cinematic Universe for that. Even before then, superhero stories have been an important...

Storytelling has evolved more rapidly in the last 100 years than in the centuries before all because of film. Movies and television have changed the way we consume stories, sped up the process for evolving genres, and given another way for people to share the stories they want to create. Even before books, people were trying to tell story through pictures. In the earliest days of cave drawings, sc...

Monster fiction as we know it came into being in the early 1800s. A large volcano erupted in 1816, causing what has become known as the year without a summer. It was during this time that we got some of the best monster fiction creations. It was during that summer that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as part of a writing contest. Most of the modern monster fiction we enjoy, whether in books or in...