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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We extracted the extraneous (part 2)

From Scott: In my previous post, I discussed the inclusion of unnecessary clutter in your novels and how this can be detrimental to the quality of your work. If you put emphasis on something in a particular scene, it’s generally

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Writing great dialog–Part 2

From Rick: In this part, I’m going discuss defining character with dialog. Many new authors don’t grasp this starting out, and they end up having all their characters talk alike. We’ve all read novels where it was difficult to keep

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Writing great dialog–Part 1

From Rick: As I mentioned in last week’s brief post, Scott and I lately have been quite busy. So, for a while, we’re going to reduce the length of our blog posts, dividing them into multiple posts when necessary, to

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Bad writing habits–examples

From Rick and Scott: Last week Scott talked about four bad habits of writers. The first was the use of habit words and phrases. Nearly every author is guilty of falling into the use of certain repetitive writing habits. The

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