Inky Blog

5 Steps to Creating Powerful Writing Affirmations Imposter syndrome is real. You’ve been told you’re a good writer all through school. You took all the right classes. Maybe you even majored in English or earned an MFA in creative writing. Yet procrastination can drive you so off track that you wonder how you can consider yourself a “real” writer if you never seem to get around to writing. And if you rarely have time to practice, how can you be any good? Alternately, you love to write, and you write well, but life took you on another path. Now you don’t think it’s valid to consider writing as any more than a hobby. You don’t have the benefit of an academic background in English and certainly not in the more commercial or kind of genre fiction you prefer to write. You’re not sure of what makes a manuscript marketable or what you need to do to get yours to fit that bill. Either way, receiving any kind of feedback — even from well-intentioned and constructive readers — only seems to confir... read more

The Problem with Prologues What Brain Science Says about Writing with Story Structures #2 The insights from cognitive psychology can help us understand the effects and usefulness of story structures, and this is what I break down in this series. In these articles on story structure elements, I dive into the effects of story on readers and how these structures play a part in that. I also offer suggestions for what writers can do to have the best of both worlds — both the joy of just writing and creating a tale readers will want to read. Three Problems with Prologues (According to Brain Science) Let me give you a little sneak peek into my life as a book editor: It’s early in the day. I’ve gotten a new editing request from a fantasy author two days prior. She sent in her new client application, and it suggested we’d be a good fit to work together. I requested a sample of her manuscript’s opening to get a feel for her story and style, and the file hits my inbox with... read more