Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 20

Story Tropes: How Do We Twist a Cliché?

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Sometimes we’ll hear writing advice like “avoid clichés,” but what does that mean when it comes to story tropes? After all, while clichés are usually considered bad, tropes can be downright helpful.

In other words, there’s likely more nuance in that typical “avoid” advice that we should understand. For instance, if tropes can sometimes be helpful, how do we tap into that helpfulness?

Most writing advice, no matter how eye-rolling, contains...

6 Ways to Show Emotions for Non-POV Characters — Guest: Becca Puglisi

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Two weeks ago, I helped Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi of Writers Helping Writers announce their latest Thesaurus book: the second edition of their amazing Emotion Thesaurus. I love the first edition and am eagerly awaiting the second edition’s release in two weeks. Woo hoo!

The ET has helped me so much by broadening my “vocabulary” in how to show my characters’ emotions. Plus, as I’ve written about before, the ET can also help us avoid...

Aspirational Stories: Do They Reflect Your Hopes and Goals?

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The romance genre is often called aspirational. Readers might aspire to be as confident as the main character or hope to experience such a grand love, etc. The genre is all about happy endings, and we probably all wish for more happiness in our life.

However, many stories outside the genre include aspects we might aspire to as well. According to Google, aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something.” That perspective doesn’t lim...

How Do Pantsers Develop Characters?

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Every story we write might need different approaches, and knowing our various writing-process options can help us be flexible to those needs. As I mentioned in that post linked above, a few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Keystroke Medium podcast, talking about story structure and beat sheets.

However, despite being known for my story structure and beat sheet tools for planning/plotting a story, I actually fall closer to the pantser end of...

Our Story’s Essence: What’s the Story We Want to Tell?

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Last week, we talked about discovering the essence of our character. Relatedly, over the past few days, several thoughts rolled around my head that made me wonder about the essence of our story.

Or to put it another way: What makes a story idea the one we want to tell?

For any story seed, premise, or theme—such as “a character faces the consequences of mistakes they made years ago”—we could come up with countless ways to explore that idea....

Need Help Writing Emotions? The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition Is Here!

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Today’s an exciting day because I’ve been helping Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers keep a big secret, and now I finally get to share! If you don’t know Angela and Becca, I hope you recognize the name of their most famous book: The Emotion Thesaurus.

If you’re not familiar with The Emotion Thesaurus, it lists physical, internal, and mental responses we can use with our characters for different emotions. In other...

CreateSpace to KDP: The Aftermath

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For many years, independent and self-published authors often turned to CreateSpace and its print-on-demand capabilities to offer paperback versions of their books. However, late last summer, Amazon announced that CreateSpace was going away and being merged with KDP (Kindle Digital Publishing).

Authors with books in CreateSpace were told to migrate their books over to KDP when prompted. Several blog posts recommended that authors try to mov...

3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character

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Last time, we talked about how to make sure our characters are unique and distinct by layering different aspects, from personality and worldview to how they interact with others and use coping skills. Even just layering several tropes can result in a unique combination for our character.

However, as I mentioned in the post, it’s possible to tweak layers of a character—and end up with something distinct—without actually changing the charact...

Make Characters Unique with Layering

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Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. But what does that mean?

Often that skill refers to how we layer in different elements of our story, weaving in our plot, characters, settings, emotions, etc. In fact, some writers even start with just one element—such as writing their whole story just as dialogue—and then layer in everything else once they have the shape of the story.

But tod...

Writing: A Form of Therapy? Or a Source of Insights?

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As writers, we often joke about how writing can act as therapy. We writers have been known to explore issues, hopes, or fears through our stories.

None of this should come as a surprise to readers. To spend so much time writing a story, we have to write about topics that capture our emotions and interests.

That might mean we work out a history of rejection or abuse. We might name characters after those who hurt us or helped us. We might wr...