Bethany Henry: Writing & Wellness

Today we have the great privilege of having Lewis Jorstad with us to share about how to use the Hero’s Journey to outline our stories. Lewis is an editor and book coach who also leads the thriving writing community over at  The Novel Smithy . Without further ado- take it away, Lewis! Outlining an Epic Adventure With the Hero’s Journey Deep down, outlining a novel is my happy place—and the hero’s journey is one of the best tools for planning an epic adventure. Whether you’ve traditionally thought of yourself as a planner, or lean more on the pantsing side, there’s a lot of value in outlining a novel (even just the basics). It gives you space to step back and test your ideas, puzzle through tricky plot holes and questions, and build confidence that your story will work. It’s a powerful way to mitigate writer’s block too. When you have a map of your novel’s key moments, it’s a lot easier to keep moving forward when self-doubt creeps in. But, why outline with the Hero’s Journey? Though...

Today we have the privilege of having Deborah-Zenha Adams as our guest to teach us a bit about how we can use the concept of chakras to add depth to our fiction characters. Looking at chakras as a way to build characters is a new concept for me and I’m thrilled to explore this topic further! Without any further ado, take it away, Deborah! Finding Your Fictional Character’s Energy Motivators By: Deborah-Zenha Adams How an ancient philosophy of energy can help you create better characters It doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing, characters are the lifeblood of your story. No matter how perfectly-plotted, tightly-structured, and wildly creative your story is, readers might not stick with it if the characters are hollow, bland, or just plain unbelievable. You get that. We all get that. Characters must be well-rounded and fully-realized, with both positive and negative qualities to make them realistic and relatable. So why do our characters still sometimes ring hollow? More importantly,...

Earlier in the month we took a look at the importance of crafting satisfying endings to our story. Today we’re backtracking a bit to look at the story’s start! The first page (and often the first sentence!) of our novel needs to hook our readers and introduce them to our story. It is  critical  that these initial paragraphs catch the readers’ attention and keep their interest. Once they read past that first line, the next few pages play the important role of setting up the story, introducing our main character, and at least hinting at a problem. Each piece of our story should keep the reader interested (and reading). Today we’ll break down strategies for crafting our first sentences and then look at how to structure our first pages. Note: Most of this work is best done during the revision process! We don’t need to get it perfect right away. It doesn’t make sense to agonize over the word choices of our first sentence in our first draft if it’s just going to be changed...