Sonya M. Black

In the last post, I talked about developing a premise. You can check it out here. This week, we will talk about creating characters. Characters are the foundation on which a story is built. They are the most essential part of developing your story. The premise is your guideline to what sort of characters you will need. So how do we connect them? ​​First, you need to look at what your premise tells you about your characters. Going back to my example from my earlier post, w

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to blog. Life, illness, and general circumstances led me to take an extended break. But, I’m back at it. After some pushing from writer friends, I’ve jumped into the freelance editing pool. In doing so, I’ve decided to focus my blog on writing and editing tips. To start, in a writer’s group I belong to, we’ve been discussing how to plot and how to develop a story. This is a complex subject because every writer eventually creates thei

Endings are one of the easiest and hardest parts of a story to write. They wrap all the threads of the story together and present them to the reader, all tied up and pretty. Or they should anyway. Sometimes, a story ends up being forced and ‘The End’ feels false. Many of us start out with an idea for a character or setting. We have great opening hook and good insight into the world we are working in. We might even have an idea for where we want the story to end. This is impor

You’ve got a fabulous idea for a story. A brain worm that refuses to go away until you put pen to paper and exercise the writing demon. You sweat, pull out your hair, scream, and bleed buckets as you wrangle those pesky characters and beat the plot into submission. Sound familiar? Every writer has their own process for getting a story out. If you want to watch a flame war happen, go to any writing forum and state emphatically that plotting or pantsing is the only way to write