theliteraryarchitect:

(Updated 5/10/18) Hey all, I’ve got quite a few writing advice posts & answered Asks on my blog at this point, so I’m making this reference guide to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Hope it helps!

General

• 8 Ways to Improve Your Writing
• 10 Best Books About Writing Fiction
• How to Spot Bad Writing Advice: 6 Red Flags to Look For
• “Show Don’t Tell”? Not Always. Here’s When to Use Summary
• How to start a story
• More about starting stories
• The first sentence

The Writing Process, Writer’s Block, & Inspiration

• How to Train Yourself to Write Faster
• Just a friendly reminder that creativity is difficult to quantify.
• Quick Writing Tip: Make a Note to Your Future Self in Your WIP
• Quick Writing Tip: Take Notes!
• Just a friendly reminder that writing is not always a linear process.
• Quick Cure for Writer’s Block: Lower Your Expectations
• Set Realistic Goals
• Your Skills May Need Time to Catch Up to Your Vision
• It’s Okay to Experiment and Be Weird As Fuck
• Surround Yourself With Supporters
• It’s okay to take a break.
• Your First Draft is Raw Material
• Getting into “The Zone”
• Vomit Brain
• Writing from Your Imagination vs. Reality
• Dealing with Criticism
• Getting Bored with Your Own Writing
• Getting past a block
• Doing research on topics you don’t have first-hand experience with
• Journalling about your writing

Character Development

• What Does Your Main Character Want?
• How to Use Description to Show Character Development
• How to Create a Non-Cliched First-Meeting Scene
• The “It Depends” Post
• Shifting internal goals
• When to identify your character’s goal
• Writing about normal people with normal problems
• If you’re worried about your character being too similar to someone else’s character 
• Describing your characters without messing up your pacing

Story, Plot, & Pacing

• Quick Plotting Tip: Write Your Story Backwards
• Pause at the Threshold
• Slowing Down the Pace of Your Story Without Boring Your Reader
• Time Transitions
• Creating Conflict
• When & how to cut a scene
• If you’re good at creating characters but awful at creating plot
• When you’ve plotted your story but can’t get started
• En Media Res
• Writing to Your Ideal Reader
• Deus Ex Machina
• Foreshadowing
• Finding an Ending
• What to write between moments of conflict
• Starting a story with waking-up scene

Description, Setting, & Worldbuilding

• How to Make Your Descriptions Less Boring
• How to Spot an “Info-dump”
• Adding Descriptions to Intense Scenes Without Messing Up Your Story’s Flow
• How to Use Description to Show Character Development
• Worldbuilding: How much is too much?
• Modeling your fantasy world from stuff in the real world
• Internal Consistency

Point of View

• How to Choose the Right Point of View for Your Story
• A Beginner’s Guide to Multiple Point of View
• 6 Questions to Ask About Your Point of View
• How to decide if you should use first person or third person
• More point of view basics
• Head hopping

Dialogue

• How to Improve Your Dialogue
• 3 Ways to Make Your Dialogue More Interesting
• Starting a story with dialogue
• Are You Using Too Much Stage Direction?

Publishing & Sharing Your Work

• 7 Tips to Build an Audience for Your Writing
• Pros and Cons of Self Publishing
• Quick Publishing Tip: Don’t Bury Your Gold
• How to Properly Format Your Manuscript for Publication
• A warning about posting writing online that you intend to publish later
• Advice for writers who are worried about people stealing their work or ideas
• Getting feedback on your writing

Editing

• Quick Revision Tip: Read Your Writing Out Loud
• Cut the fidgeting
• Are you suffering from -ing disease?
• Are you Using Too Much Stage Direction?
• What “Editing” Really Means
• Quick Editing Tip: “That”
• Quick Revision Tip: Read Faster
• Editing Tip: Dialogue
• Tips for Editing a Story

Free Resource Library Downloads

All of these PDFs are available to download in my Free Resource Library.

• Creating Character Arcs Workbook
• Point of View Cheatsheet
• Dialogue Checklist
• Setting Checklist
• Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Editor Printable Checklist
• Proper Manuscript Format Printable Checklist
• Short Story & Novel Submission Templates

…if you find any broken links please let me know and I will fix them! xo

*I recently changed the name of my blog. All of these links should work, but if you come across a “Bucket Siler has moved!” page when clicking on a link inside an old post, there’s an easy way to find what you’re looking for: In the url, delete “bucketsiler,” write “theliteraryarchitect,” then hit return. Also, let me know about it & I will fix it 🙂