This week’s show is about writing backstory, both generally and for recurring series characters. When you’re creating your characters, and you know they have this huge history just remember … all the reader really needs to know is what matters in the moment.  — Taylor Hi, Steve here! This week’s episode came out of a conversation that […]

I would never advise someone sending a young woman off into a dark and abandoned building, by herself, without ever letting anybody know that she’s there … simply because they’re trying to make it big, bad and scary. Because, readers read that and they roll their eyes and go, “Seriously?”  —  Taylor In this week’s […]

Today’s episode is all about tension, specifically, ways to ramp up the tension in your writing. But before we get to the show notes for today’s episode, we’d like to welcome you to the new home of The Taylor Stevens show. We’re exciting to have more room for show notes and to be able to […]

In this episode, we discuss endings, what they should include and what they should do for the reader. Taylor describes what she considers the most important role of a novel’s ending, when to begin wrapping up the threads of your story, and the critical role reader fulfillment plays in driving book sales through word of mouth. […]

In this episode, we discuss endings, what they should include and what they should do for the reader. Taylor describes what she considers the most important role of a novel’s ending, when to begin wrapping up the threads of your story, and the critical role reader fulfillment plays in driving book sales through word of mouth. […]

Breathing Emotional Life into Your Characters In this episode, the second in a new two-part series on going beyond the first draft, we dig deeply into Taylor’s process for adding emotional life to her characters. For her, this step can take place in a third pass, which she refers to as adding the “fine brush strokes” […]

In this episode, the first in a new two-part series, we discuss the way Taylor creates the different drafts of her manuscripts. She shares the reason why the initial 25%  of her first draft takes so long, and why the rest gets progressively quicker. Then we dig into her process for the second and third drafts, where […]

In this episode, we discuss dogs, cats and the importance of the well-developed antagonist in fiction. We pull from examples like the easy to hate Dollmaker in THE DOLL, to Nonomi Sato, the antagonist that many of Taylor’s fans may have pulled for in parts of THE MASK. We also announce a new way to get […]

This episode concludes our two-part series comparing the publication processes for one traditionally published author (Taylor) with that of one indie published author (Steve.) On this show, we discuss what happens after the manuscript has been finished and the editing process is complete.  Everything from cover design and layout to writing back cover material, marketing blurbs, […]

In this episode, we begin a two-part series comparing the publication processes for one traditionally published author (Taylor) with that of one indie published author (Steve.) Both processes start with the completion of a manuscript, but differences appear soon after the manuscript is finished. Our primary focus in part one of the series is the […]