An eleven-year-old blind boy pulls himself over an eight-foot chain-link fence and falls to the ground. How would the boy describe the fall and the attention he received afterward? Great...

Seminars are taught on “point of view,” the perspective from which a story is told. Because readers today want to identify with the main character in a scene, we should...

A writer’s favorite set of descriptions quickly become overused, becoming cliché. We must challenge ourselves to dig deeply into a character’s emotion and visualize the actions that would make perfect...

First-person storytelling tends to be more intimate, but we may still find places where we can deepen the point of view, with less objective telling. Great words from The Girl...

A common mistake we make is writing “made his way,” which does no more than the better expression: “went.” If we want readers to see the difficulty of a journey,...

Before we can find words to create a vivid picture, we must first have the picture. So we might ask what “spooky” looks like. As a mental picture forms, we...

Inside ancient Jerusalem, someone couldn’t see beyond the walls but had to anticipate what lay ahead by what came through the city gate. The Nazarene by Sholem Asch was first...

Present tense is difficult to write. Even the highly skilled can easily drift into past-tense storytelling in which the immediacy of the present moment is lost. A similar problem exists...

Readers want to feel the character's hope, not just be told about it. Great words from False Memory by Dean Koontz: Martie didn’t know how the doctor was able to...

Author Tom Sullivan is blind, but he has enjoyed a wonderful career that shows how our handicaps can become springboards to exceptional success. Sighted people tend to regard fences as...