Tips and advice about writing scenes.
Regardless of whether you love them or loathe them, flashbacks are a great tool to use when writing your novel. Among other things, they allow you to get info to your readers that can be relatable, quick, and merge well with the story you’re telling, and help to solidify character actions. While that might sound …
When starting a new manuscript, everyone knows the first draft just needs to be written. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the whole plot, every single character, or the ending, just as long as you know something to get the words flowing. But what happens when you can write the first chapter, but just …
When it comes to writing, I’m not a plotter, and despite my love of organization, I don’t plan. When starting a WIP, I usually have little knowledge of how things will end. I may have a few ideas for the start, some characters who are louder than others, a few sentences of dialogue, or a …
Continue reading Questions to Create a Non-Plotter’s First Draft Outline
Now that the world’s time zones have ticked over to the 3rd of June 2025, Writing and Editing Checklists: Everything You Need to Take Your Book from First Draft to Publication is officially out! Available from the usual retailers of paperbacks and ebooks, you can scroll to the bottom of this post for all the …
Sometimes, no matter how much we’ve planned, plotted, outlined, and written, a scene just doesn't work how we want it to. The trouble is, said scene is important. The book needs it, and you have to get it right. For when such occasions happen, here are a few options you can try to switch the …
Whether your book is full of action scenes, or requires just one, getting the balance right is a skill worthy of any writer, and can be achieved with some simple do's and don'ts! Action Scene Do's And Don'ts Do Make Things Clear There’s nothing worse than reading an action scene and not being able to …
As writers, we’ve all been there. Enthusiastic to start a project one minute, doing everything to avoid working on it the next. While you could claim distractions, work, responsibilities, and life are impeding your writing progress, sometimes, the reason you can’t get any words down is that you’ve got a stuck scene. Fixing A Stuck …
While you might not be a writer of action-based books, chances are if there’s any type of conflict in your novel, you may have to write an action scene. I did, after starting my YA series, Blackbirch. For a book about teens with magickal abilities, there ended up being a few scenes that required me …
Unless you're a super-organized planner who stuck to your writing outline religiously, there will come a point during editing when you'll re-read a scene and have to make sure it includes everything you wanted. This is my dilemma as I work on my current work in progress. I wrote the draft back in 2017, so …
K.M. Allan 