World-building isn’t easy to do. You’ve got so many details to share about your characters and how their world works! So sometimes it happens: the dreaded info-dump.

I’ve never been a writer who outlines. For anything! Not, of course, for the books I wrote, but not for school papers, not for professional essays, not for presentations or speeches.

The filmmaker Billy Wilder introduced the idea that you “give the audience two plus two, and let them add it up.”

“Inciting incident.” “Midpoint.” “All is lost.”

Maybe you’ve heard of these key scenes that must be in your novel, but do you know where they go?

Gardening is a great diversion when you need a break from writing. But it also holds keys to the writing process.

Do you use the same go-to words to describe your scenes, characters, and settings? Consider lifting up your prose with a word bank.

Have you ever put [insert great description here] in your first draft, hoping that your Future Self will have a revelation? We've all been there. Here are five easy ways to improve your character descriptions.

You wrote the first draft and now you realize it’s a hot, steaming mess. Welcome to Revision Hell.

The new year’s a time when the Angel Editors start getting an uptick in inquiries about our services. Which means it’s a good time to talk about what editors can do for you and your manuscript—and what we can’t.

One of the things I see in my editing on a near-daily basis is the incorrect use of the personal pronouns. I blame your middle school English teachers for this.

Maurice Sendak did it. You can, too! How to use figures of speech to make your pictures books more awesome.

Whatever your experience, writing in 2020 was not like writing in any other year. Here are a few lessons I have learned from writing this year:

My schedule for revising the novel went out the window. I could have let my broken schedule get me down, but instead I let it go. I had a secret weapon giving me a boost: my daily drafting journal.

In recent years, we have begun to understand on a deeper level the complexity of reading. Neuroscientists have conducted various studies to explore what is happening in our brain when we read. There are even whole books dedicated to this science. The reading done by writers, though, takes on a different kind of importance; it’s vital to a writer’s craft.

…for every writer who dreams of pouring their stories onto the page, I say that NaNoWriMo should never be measured in terms like “success” or “failure.” Instead, regardless of where your goals landed, I’d argue the question we should all ask ourselves is “where do I go from here?”

If there’s one thing that scares me as a writer-editor, it’s the possibility of grammar errors creeping into my own prose. I’m the one who’s supposed to root out mistakes, but my first drafts can be as dashed-off and crappy as anyone else’s! There’s one tricky mistake in particular that gives me nightmares, because it’s so easy to overlook: the dangling modifier.