Guest Posts | Writing Forward

Urban Inspiration: Discovering the Muse in Your City

Please welcome our guest, author Belo Cipriani, with a post about finding inspiration in an urban setting. Most of my recent writing has happened in the city due to travel, teaching, and other time constraints. When I told my students, they struggled to believe that I got the ideas for my essays and fiction from…Read More

The Five Rules of Writing Flashbacks

Please welcome author Stuart Horwitz with a guest post on writing flashbacks. “Flashback” is a term that we are all familiar with, even if its definition has grown a little vague. We sense that a flashback is something that happened before…but happened before what? Where we are now? In other words, what are we flashing…Read More

Film-Friendly Writing: Crafting a Story with Hollywood Appeal

Please welcome guest author John Robert Marlow with a post on writing a story with Hollywood appeal. Too many authors write a book or other story, cross their fingers, and hope that one day Hollywood might come calling. But in the words of the world’s most successful filmmaker, James Cameron, “Hope is not a strategy.”…Read More

Do Not Let the Decline of Spoken English Ruin Your Writing

Don’t Let the Decline of Spoken English Ruin Your Writing

Please welcome author Debra Brenegan with an insightful guest post about grammar and writing. We are all a little sloppy when we speak. We skip some of the basic grammar rules in order to create intimacy and shortcuts — like secrets between best friends. Such conversation helps us connect to others. But when casual phrases…Read More

Motivation for Writers: Five Techniques

Please welcome guest blogger Aileen Pablo with five tips to help writers stay motivated. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you planned on starting that draft of your novel last month, but life got in the way. Now answer me this – how many months have you been using that excuse? The shameful secret that…Read More

The Life-Changing Effects of Reading

Please welcome guest blogger Lena Paul, sharing insight on the benefits of reading. Avid readers know the feeling: reading the last word of a book, slowly closing the cover, and being changed. Great books change people, whether it is how they view the world or how they feel about themselves. Reading can be life-altering. Literacy…Read More

Learning the Hard Way: Editing is Critical

Please welcome guest blogger, Scott Bartlett, with a post about the importance of editing. It took me a couple novels to get used to the idea that writers also have to be editors. (In fact, they should be editors more frequently than they’re writers, but I’ll get to that a little later.) I wrote my…Read More

The Myth of All-You-Can-Eat Sensory Details

Please welcome author Lisa Cron with a guest post on sensory details in writing. Writers are often advised to stock their stories with abundant sensory details in order to bring them to life. This can indeed be good advice, because sensory details allow the reader to create vivid mental images. In fact, as recent brain…Read More

How To Write A Novel in 500 Words A Day

Today’s guest post is by Sarah O’Holla, who has found a simple, effective way to write every day. We are living in a time when results are expected to happen fast. But what constitutes fast? Yes, you might be able to write a first draft of a novel in 30 days during NaNoWriMo, but will…Read More

5 Ways to Use Narrative Viewpoint in Fiction Writing

Please welcome today’s guest writer, N. Strauss, editor of the website Creative Writing Now. Narrative point of view is the perspective you use to tell a story. It’s like the location of the camera in a movie scene. You can write a story from the point of view of just one character so that the…Read More