wordswimmer

When you’re thinking about your story’s structure—the way a story unfolds and why it’s so compelling —it can help to watch movies, not only ...

When we revise our work, it is often difficult to see past the polished prose that we’ve spent so much time burnishing to a high gloss. ...

In A Long Walk to Water, Linda Sue Park uses two narrative threads—the story of Salva fleeing his village in war-torn Sudan and...

In Helen Frost's new verse novel, Hidden , only Wren and Darra, two teenage girls in the same bunk at camp, know they share a secret. It...

In response to last week’s post, J. Irvin Kuns, the author of While You Were Out (Dutton, 2004, a Junior Library Guild selection), wrote: A...

You can get caught in invisible nets when trying to revise if you’re not careful, if you look too closely at the words instead of pulling ba...

I’m wondering if one of the essential principles of structure is the empty bowl theory: start with a character who has an emotional need (an...

Almost every story has an emotional arc, a trajectory that the reader can trace–like the flight of an arrow–as the character makes his or he...

What does making a Cat's Cradle--a game that children play with string--have to do with writing (aside from serving as yet another way t...