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Where We Write… One Stop For Writers

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The founders of Writers Helping Writers have created an innovative platform for writers to boost their creativity and enhance their skills set: One Stop For Writers. The creators call it the "library," and it's complete with an "Information Desk," "Thesaurus," "The Stacks," and more.

Whether this is your first rodeo and you need some entry level writing help, or you're an old hand and just want a fun way to plan your novel, One Stop For Writers has scads of resources, templates, online tools, and lessons to help you write the best novel yet.

We're going to cover just the highlights because it can take you days of roaming around the "library" to see and experience everything.


Why You Should Be Able to State Your Story's Theme in One Sentence

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Theme is not your character arc, nor is it the plot or what happens to your character. It's actually the essence that ties those two together. If someone asks you "what is your book about?" you don't respond with scene-by-scene detail, or the changes your character goes through.

You think of your character and what essential thing she or he comes to understand through the course of the book.

If you can't do that, you don't have a firm grasp on your story's theme.

How to use Active Reading to Become a Better Writer

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Authors often discuss how reading improves your writing. However, there’s a big difference between passive and active reading, and if you’re serious about using published novels to improve your writing you must learn how to do the later.

When you read passively, you consuming a novel as entertainment – you’re trawling through without paying attention to detail. This lets you form a broad judgement (“this is great!”).

By contrast, active reading involves specific focus on an author’s craft. It is to passive reading what fly-fishing is to trawling. Active reading encourages your judgement to be precise (“this is great because the chapter endings created lots of suspense!”).

Why Your Ending is as Important as Your Book's Hook

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Have you ever been so engrossed in a book that if the ending isn't strong and doesn't resolve all the plot threads, you're disappointed in the whole book? I once read a novel with a deeply engaging main character I really connected with. She struggled and overcame and struggled and overcame. And at the very end of the book, the author killed her. WHAT? It's the only time I've ever thrown a book. And I refused to read anything more by that author.

You know how important it is to hook your reader from the very beginning. It's why you start in the middle of the action, plunging your reader right in so they get caught up in the excitement.

Your ending is as important…if not more.

How to do Copywriting for SEO

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SEO is probably one of the least understood online topics period. This doesn’t come as a surprise once you understand just how often search engines such as Google adjust and calibrate their ranking algorithm. The biggest challenge content creators then have to face is writing content which not only appeals to the right kind of audience but is also optimized for various search engines. But the moment you realize that content should revolve around people instead of search engines, you will find that SEO copywriting really isn’t that complicated.

What Margaret Atwood Taught Me About Writing Outside Your Genre

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Margaret Atwood recently wrote an essay titled "Margaret Atwood on What The Handmaid's Tale Means in the Age of Trump" that caught my eye. There has been a swarm of interest around the book thanks to the upcoming series on Hulu, but I have to admit that I was curious to see if her political views matched mine.

What I found most compelling in the article, however, is how she talked about stretching herself outside her genre when she wrote The Handmaid's Tale:

  • "It seemed to me a risky venture. I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real."

15 Productivity Apps to Help Keep Your Writing Goals on Track

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It doesn’t matter if you’re the most prolific writer in the world, distractions and writer’s block can get the best of all of us at some point or another.

The Writer’s Bundle: An Amazing Offer Available Only From April 3-6, 2017!

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$1,667 of Writing Resources for $99The Writer’s Bundle: An Amazing Offer Available Only From April 3-6, 2017!

Stop Researching & Get Writing!

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Researching can be fun. No, seriously. If you're writing about a new topic for a blog post or an interesting subject for a work of fiction, it's the details that help your writing ring true.

Some experts say you can't do too much research if you want your prose to be believable. There is a point, however, that research becomes a way to procrastinate the actual writing itself.

How to Write Multiple Points of View

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When you’re starting a new story, determining POV is a very important choice. Writing from multiple POVs can be frustrating and confusing for readers if it’s not handled well, so you need to have a very good reason for using multiple POVs in your story.

That said, here are a few tips on how to craft a story using multiple POVs:

How to Write the ‘Other’ (Without Being a Jerk)

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It was during a Guardian webchat last year that one of my favourite authors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, offered no-nonsense words of advice to an aspiring writer that rather stopped me in my tracks. The commenter had asked how he, a middle-aged white man, should go about writing the story of a young Bengali girl, who belonged to a culture that he readily admitted was alien to his own. Chimamanda invited him to re-examine his motivation to write about something so unfamiliar and seemed to endorse the age-old adage that you should write what you know.

Gender Neutral Pronoun Consistency—Is This Still a Thing?

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How many times have you written a sentence using a gender-neutral antecedent (the word a pronoun replaces) and stumbled? Which pronoun do you use—he or she?The student may borrow whichever book he (or she?) needs. The Traditional Solution

The 10 Best Facebook Groups for Writers

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Sometimes as I sit at my desk in a remote corner of the house, writing my soul out on the page, I need the company of other writers. Someone who understands how I can both crave and loath this quiet aloneness. When it's 2am, and I'm working feverishly to meet a deadline or trying to make sense out of the jumble of ideas in my brain, I need community.

What is the Most Important Copywriting Skill to Master?

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There are a lot of essential skills to master if you are going to write effective copy. I don't want to downplay the importance good writing, proper grammar, thorough research, and SEO optimization, but there is another skill that stands above the rest.

Have Your Written Your Story's 'Mirror Moment' Yet?

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I recently came across a book by James Scott Bell that lays out an interesting premise about something he calls the 'mirror moment'.

It's Bell's theory that there is a single moment in the middle of the story where the main character takes a "long, hard look at himself (as in a mirror). He asks, Who am I? What have I become? Who am I supposed to be?"

Bell says if you can nail that moment, everything that comes before and after it will have more depth and resonance.


Maintaining Focus While Writing: A Review of the Freedom App

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Do you get distracted easily when writing? Do you check Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram when your writing slows down or you reach a difficult section?

Have You Written Your Story's 'Mirror Moment' Yet?

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I recently came across a book by James Scott Bell that lays out an interesting premise about something he calls the 'mirror moment'.

Bell's theory is that there is a single moment in the middle of the story where the main character takes a "long, hard look at himself (as in a mirror). He asks, Who am I? What have I become? Who am I supposed to be?"

Bell says if you can nail that moment, everything that comes before and after it will have more depth and resonance.

A Letter from Roald Dahl: "Eschew All Those Beastly Adjectives."

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When a student wrote to Roald Dahl in 1980 asking for help on his thesis, he received this rather curt letter in reply. We think it's wonderful.

How to Write a Killer Transition

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How do you move your reader smoothly between ideas in your content or from scene to scene in your novel? With killer transitions that connect and unify your writing as a whole.

What is a Transition? There are two types of transitions to cover: transitions in content connecting paragraphs and highlighting relevant, important points and transitions between scenes or POV switches in manuscripts.

15 Best Content Marketing Blogs to Follow

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How do you stay abreast of the latest, greatest information about content marketing? We put together a list of our top 15 content marketing blogs you need to start following.

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