Advanced description problems are harder to diagnose than beginner ones. The prose sounds good, which makes writers protective of it. Unfortunately, readers don’t award bonus points for decorative suffering. Here's how you can create details that imply entire worlds, rather than extremely confident wallpaper.

In self-publishing, reviews matter. They influence readers, visibility, and your mood more than is sensible. One thoughtful review can buoy your week. One odd complaint can have you pacing around with a cup of hot coffee and a keyboard under threat of serious bodily harm. Here's how to survive the opinion market.

What writing advertising campaigns taught me about writing faster without writing worse.

Most self-publishing advice is practical. All of it's useful. Some of it even works. But self-publishing isn’t just a logistical exercise. It’s an emotional one. Here's some advice for dealing with that.

These are the mistakes that feel like progress because they look like writing. They resemble depth, intelligence,emotional weight. Unfortunately, they’re the narrative equivalent of being an Amazon page of shiny fire extinguishers distracting you from the house actually burning down around you. Here's how to deal with them.

Unless your write a runaway bestseller (the equivalent to winning the lottery but with considerably worse odds) one book is just a business card. A career is a stack of them. You don’t have to write the single greatest novel in the history of literature. But to build a career, you do have to keep writing.

Here, are several things I learned about plot,almost all of them later than would have been ideal. The next time one of your stories stalls, you might be able to recognise the problem slightly faster. And, with luck, fix it before draft three.

Most self-published books fail, no spectacularly. There are no bonfires of Goodreads reviews. They simply appear, make a small polite noise, and then disappear to live out their days alongside abandoned blogs, unused Pelotons, and the author’s brief conviction that the launch just needed “a bitmore time.” Here’s why that keeps happening.

In this episode of Words on Writing, James Dunlop, author of the Andrew MacKay thrillers, explores why villains are often the weakest part of a story and how a good villain is often the character that does most of the work to drives yournarrative forward.

If you’re writing a story, this video might help you find ways to take your villain from pure evil but ineffective to more something that keeps your readers hooked. 

I think if you want to write a novel, you should know what you’re in for. Here are some rather uncomfortable but brutally honest truths I learned when I started writing fiction.

Writing’s