Helping Writers Become Authors

Hosted ByK.M. Weiland

Helping Writers Become Authors provides writers help in summoning inspiration, crafting solid characters, outlining and structuring novels, and polishing prose. Learn how to write a book and edit it into a story agents will buy and readers will love. (Music intro by Kevin MacLeod.)


All Episodes

It’s What Your Characters Do That Defines Them

Characters need to do something to prove themselves worth defining.

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Why Genre Writing Could Kill Your Career

Genres too often lead to cliched storylines, sub-par writing, and, in the long run, a less discerning and demanding reading public.

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Backstory: The Importance of What Isn’t Told

Particularly during this modern trend of beginning stories in medias res (in the middle of things), a deep and full-bodied backstory is every whit as important as the story itself.

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Choosing Your Character’s Career With Care

What your character does for a living, even if it doesn’t feature prominently in your story, will profoundly affect who he is and how he responds to the world around him.

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Sticking With a Story

If you are willing to stick with a story and resist the urge to let go when the going gets tough, you are likely to discover one of the most important traits of any artist: perseverance.

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yWriter Software Tutorial

Tutorial for yWriter, the quintessential organizer for writers.

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Making Cliches Work for You

Cliches need not be dreaded bogeymen who haunt our work, but rather exciting and multi-faceted challenges that we can make work for us in many ways.

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5 Ways to Pace Your Story

Pacing is like a dam. It allows the writer to control just how fast or how slow his plot flows through the riverbed of his story. Understanding how to operate that dam is one of the most important tasks an author has to learn.

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Details: Bringing Fiction to Life

Learn why the details of an author’s prose decide whether a story will be the entertainment of an hour or a lasting piece of literature.

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