Writing Tips | Writing Forward

Using Metaphors to Enhance Your Writing

A while back, I wrote a piece that had nothing to do with food, but food became a running metaphor while I was revising. The food metaphor was so delicious (or maybe I was so hungry) that I rewrote the entire post with food on the brain. The blog posts I write with metaphors get…Read More

Writing Tips: Know Your Audience

It’s an old adage for writers: know your audience. But what does that mean? How well must we know the audience? And does knowing the audience increase our chances of getting published or selling our books? Some writers insist that the best way to write is to just write for yourself. Sit down and let…Read More

Writing Tips: Writing is Rewriting

Those of us who spend a lot of time studying the craft of writing inevitably come across bits of writing advice that we hear over and over again: show don’t tell, write what you know, and kill your darlings. These writing tips can be a bit cryptic, but the one about revisions is crystal clear:…Read More

Writing Tips: Write What You Know

A common piece of writing advice is write what you know. When I first heard this advice, I thought it was odd. I don’t remember where I first heard it, but I remember thinking that as far as writing tips went, it was absurd. What about writing from your imagination or your feelings? How do genres…Read More

How to Critique Other Writers’ Work

As a writer, it helps to be thick-skinned. Once you put your work out there, people will judge, review, and criticize it. But critiques are more helpful when they are received long before publication. In fact, critiques are one of the best ways to improve your writing. Many writers who want critiques that will help…Read More

Writing Tips: Show, Don’t Tell

The first time I heard the advice “show, don’t tell,” I was young and it confused me. Show what? Isn’t writing all about telling a story? At the time, I shrugged it off as some kind of mysterious double-talk, but the phrase kept popping up: show, don’t tell. It rolled off my teachers’ tongues. I…Read More

The 22 Best Writing Tips Ever

Today, I’m sharing one of the oldest and most popular posts on Writing Forward. This one dates back to 2007, but it’s still one of the most-visited posts on the blog and one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy these writing tips and find them useful! Brian Clark over at Copyblogger issued a challenge…Read More

Writing Tips: Do It Anyway

From a distance, writing looks like one of the easiest jobs in the world. You get to set your own hours. You’re not tied to a place of employment. And you spend your days making up stories. However, writing is not as easy as it looks. It can be thrilling, exhilarating, daunting, and exhausting….Read More

How to Defeat Writer’s Block

Wikipedia defines writer’s block as “a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work.” However, I have come to believe that in most cases, writer’s block is a symptom, not a condition. Before we can alleviate writer’s block, we have to diagnose it. Writer’s block is…Read More

Good Grammar and Bad Manners: How to Handle Writing Mistakes in Public

I’m a writer, but before I’m a writer, I’m a human being. And as a human being, sometimes I make mistakes. Let’s face it, we all make mistakes — some big, some small. Today I want to talk about what happens when we, as writers, make a mistake in our work: a typo, an incorrectly…Read More