Guest Posts | Writing Forward

Your Characters Aren’t Your Children

Please welcome guest author Joshua Danton Boyd with a post on character development in fiction writing. For writers, characters can be very personal creations. Despite being taken from the ether, we can become attached to them, especially if we’ve been working on their story for years. With all the time and effort put into crafting…Read More

The Indie Edge in Fiction

Please welcome guest authors Evan Marshall and Martha Jewett with a post about indie publishing and the many benefits it offers fiction writers. This post contains affiliate links that earn commissions for this website from qualifying purchases. A number of clients of Evan’s literary agency have begun to self-publish, or indie-publish, as a supplement to…Read More

Discovering Your Story: 5 Ways to Find the Missing Pieces

Please welcome author Ali Luke with five excellent tips for finding the missing pieces of your story. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” – Michelangelo Do you invent your story or do you discover it? Writing is a process of invention….Read More

What Are Plot Points?

Please welcome author K.M. Weiland with a guest post on structuring your novel. Take moment to think of some of the most significant scenes in your favorite stories. More than likely, the scenes that pop to mind are those in which major events occur: Jane meets Mr. Rochester, the Titanic hits the iceberg, Darth Vader…Read More

9 Steps to Writing a Science-Fiction Novel

Please welcome Sarah Kolb-Williams with a guest post on writing a science-fiction novel. Writing a science-fiction novel isn’t all rockets and robots—it’s a brainy labor of love, and it takes a good deal of time and attention to detail to get it right. Here’s how to emerge from the process still standing: 1. Think, Then…Read More

How to Write Well Without Losing Your Mind

Please welcome writing coach and author Dana Leipold with an article on staying sane as a writer. When I was in college, I had to write a senior thesis about marketing that had to be eighty pages long, minimum. The most I had written up until then was a twenty-five-page short story about a girl…Read More

How to Write Fiction Based on Fact

Please welcome guest writer Sam Russell with a post about writing fiction based on fact. Let’s dispel a myth: you don’t have to write what you know. However, you need to know what you write. Fiction is neither real nor unreal; it exists between places of factual certainty and the avenues of an author’s imagination….Read More

Three Successful Authors and How They Made it Big

Please welcome Terry Martin with a look at three successful authors who made it big. Do you dream of writing a novel? Have you ever wondered how the biggest selling authors got their breaks and what they might have done in common to succeed? Maybe you’ve sent your novel to a publisher, where it was…Read More

The Sweet Highs And Sugar Crashes of Writing with a Bestseller

Please welcome guest author Tony Vanderwarker, who has generously shared his experience studying writing under his mentor, best-selling author John Grisham. A while ago, having been asked to introduce friend and neighbor John Grisham at a writers’ retreat, I took the opportunity to give the audience a peek into John’s incredible plot development machine. As…Read More

The Protagonist Problem: why is the hero or heroine so often the least interesting character in the book?

This post contains affiliate links that earn commissions for this website from qualifying purchases. Please welcome David Corbett, author of The Art of Character, with a guest post that explores common problems with protagonists in fiction writing. Catch them in an unguarded moment and many writers will confess that villains and secondary characters are much…Read More