How J.K. Rowling Mastered Writing in Different Mediums

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How J.K. Rowling Mastered Writing in Different Mediums

Every winter when everyone begins to snuggle up by the fire and celebrate the holiday season, I always feel a strong urge to return to my worn, yet beloved Harry Potter collection. Harry Potter, in many ways, is what made me who I am today. When I was younger and one of the last in my class to learn to read, Harry Potter became the entertaining push to keep me going. Very quickly it became an obsession and one that I have sustained throughout my entire life. With that obsession I developed a love for reading, but also other storytelling forms that I couldn't appreciate until I was much older and much more widely read.

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The Storytelling Gift Guide

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The Storytelling Gift Guide

No matter what holiday you celebrate, you should celebrate your storytelling self by giving yourself a treat! But beyond just giving yourself some new pens or a fancy notebook, this year I want you to consider challenging yourself with your gift, picking out a new genre or medium you wouldn't usually select and giving it a chance. That's why I've created several gift guides for you to help you branch out, but also treat yourself to something nice!

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How to Tell When Your Story is Finished

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How to Tell When Your Story is Finished

With NaNoWriMo and therefore many people's stories coming to an end (congrats to all of you who did it by the way! Get yourself something nice!), a lot of storytellers are now faced with the dilemma of where to go next. While writing another story should always be on the horizon, there also is the difficulty in determining when your story is actually completed and what is next for it.

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How to Get Out of a Storytelling Slump and Start Writing Again

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How to Get Out of a Storytelling Slump and Start Writing Again

Whether you're a new storyteller or an old one, you will eventually encounter the dreaded storytelling slump. Up until that slump, writing was coming easily, or if it wasn't, it was at least still enjoyable and your work was turning out to resemble something you may someday love, until one day it wasn't anymore.

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How to Write a TV Pilot

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How to Write a TV Pilot

Television is having a big moment right now, perhaps even more so than movies. With fantastic series on Netflix, HBO, AMC and so forth, it seems like television writing is the place to be. And why not? Unlike with films, writers rule television. Plus, television writing offers a regular paying job, perhaps one of the few in the storytelling world, where most of us work "freelance" (if we work as a writer at all).

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Why You Should Be Writing Short Stories

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Why You Should Be Writing Short Stories

Ever since I was little, I have been taken by the idea of writing a novel. As a child, I wrote several novel beginnings, never finishing an entire draft until I was twenty years old. A contrarian in every way possible, while other people wrote short stories and did mini writing exercises, I vehemently protested the "system" by always pursuing novel ideas. 

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How to Treat the Camera like a Character

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How to Treat the Camera like a Character

One of the major things I think is neglected in screenwriting lessons is the discussion of a narrator. By contrast, when people learn fiction writing, this is almost always brought up. Perhaps it's because for film, when we think of narrators we think of Woody Allen films where he provides information for us via voice-overs or Ferris Bueller's Day Off when he looks at the camera and talks to us. While there are technical film terms for these devices, there is rarely discussion about the other types of narration within the medium, such as omniscient or close-third.

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5 Signs You Need to Break Up With Your Story

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5 Signs You Need to Break Up With Your Story

Break ups are hard. And not because whatever or whomever you're breaking up with is just important to you, but because of all the time you feel has been lost afterwards. Your mind wonders if maybe you'd have been better of never encountering this person (or story!) or what you're supposed to do with all the scraps of those efforts. Do you toss them out? Do you try and build back up the pieces? Or do you attempt to forget it all?

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Two Ways to Structure Your Literary Fiction Novel

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Two Ways to Structure Your Literary Fiction Novel

The term "literary fiction," is a bit of a loaded one. Defined as any fictional work that holds "literary merit," the phrase is undeniably subjective. After all, what does it mean for something to hold literary merit? Who decides such things? Why are some works better than others and how are some books universally regarded as so? Where do we draw the line and define something as literary versus not?

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Why You Shouldn't Worry About"Show, Don't Tell"

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Why You Shouldn't Worry About"Show, Don't Tell"

If you sit in a creative writing class today or read a book on the craft, you'll likely hear at some point about the hackneyed "show don't tell" rule, and maybe for a long time you've followed said rule. To clarify, it is not really a "rule" in the way we understand it, but instead exists as an unspoken standard all creatives are supposed to strive for in prose for it to be considered "good," so that "bad" prose is telling and "good" is showing. Which is not true.

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