12 Inspiring Prompts for Writers: Day 2
Welcome back to twelve days of reflective prompts that will dig deep to inspire and encourage us in the new year! Out of all the prompts, this one is probably…
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12 Inspiring Prompts for Writers: Day 1
With twelve prompts over the next few days, I will guide you through simple reflections to inspire you and encourage stronger writing efforts in 2025.
How to figure out what you love so that you can write what you love
In a perfect world, writing what you love would be easy. You’d dig deep into your heartsong and out on the page would come, you know, your heartsong—the most passionate, authentic literary expression you could muster. But we don’t live in that perfect world, and when…
Lonesome road: How to establish support networks when you’re new to writing
Writing is, in particular, a difficult art form. Unlike physical arts such as drawing, painting, or crochet, you cannot just flash your product (draft or finished) in front of just any bystander’s face and hope for external validation. I know this from experience…
Compelling openings一now with examples!
So I’m currently reading River Quest. It’s a chapter book from the Dinotopia universe and WOW does it jump on the plot horse…
What I wish I’d known about querying agents: and what I wish agents knew about querying
Hello gentle reader. It is I—Chelsea Counsell. Long time no talk. I, like you, have been trying to survive during corona, which generally means dragging myself out of bed like a rotting mollusk and continuing to labor under the yoke of capitalism even though I feel… like a rotting mollusk. In November, I began actually […]
Real on the page is not real in the world
When I wrote my post on making decisions, I described how a writer must decide things about the characters, plot, and world of their book rather than leaving them up in the air. It’s important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in order to compare that blueprint against the understanding your beta readers receive. […]
The hardest thing I ever learned was to be decisive…
In the last fifteen years, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you have to make decisions while writing. Setting a character’s motives, scars, and hobbies in stone can feel confining because, what if you decide you don’t like what you picked and then you have to change them? WORK, UGH. But […]
I love writing because…
Everyone I know who is a writer seems to think writing is really hard. And maybe parts of it are. You basically are building a simulacrum of the world, filtering signal from the noise so that your storytelling focuses on specific things that create the idea of a story or the idea of a world, […]
Exciting Books I Dream of Reading
It’s 2020 and I am 28. I don’t know what exactly happened, but I’ve gotten much better at narrowing down the type of books I want to read. Spoiler: they involve animals and girl power. When I was a teenager, I had a collection of like 800+ unread books stacked all over my room that […]
