Naming strategies—people, places, and things

From Scott: Naming your characters (and the places and things) in your story can be more challenging than it appears at first glance. After all, they’re your characters, so you can name them whatever you want, right? True, but to

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How to create characters smarter than the author

From Rick: How can you design a character that is supposed to be smarter/more clever/more intelligent than the author? This question came up recently on the Forum at Silver Pen. (Readers of this blog readers who are not members of

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Is there a universal story formula?

One of the topics often discussed in general writing workshops is basic story structure and the elements of a story. Let’s go over those first. A story–and we’re talking a piece of fiction or mostly fiction–in order to be considered

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