Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 5

How to Level Up Our Storytelling with Self-Awareness

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Last time I mentioned that I usually have several hundred tabs open in my computer browser at any one time. When I don’t have time to read or take action on information in a link right away, keeping the tab open reminds me to check it out later. Today’s post is an example of how my organized disorganization works—at least for me. *grin*

Back before the pandemic threw our lives into chaos, I’d opened an article about the five habits of sel...

Organization…for Our Creativity and Our Career

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You wouldn’t know it by looking at my desk, but I have a natural organizational system. That system is called organized disorganization. *grin* Everything looks disorganized, but I can find what I need…most of the time.

Wherever I am, I tend to accumulate piles of “things” I need to deal with: things to file, things that need follow-up, things I want to dig into, etc.

In person, those “things” build up into literal piles covering the t...

Crafting a Relationship That Matters — Guest: Angela Ackerman

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Different stories have different goals. Some care more about making us think, and others care more about making us feel. Some focus more on the plot, and others focus more on the characters. And so on.

Sometimes those goals are driven by our genre. For example, the romance genre usually strives to make readers connect and care about the characters on a personal level. Readers want to root for them to find and deserve their Happily Ever Af...

How Can We Learn and Improve Our Writing Skills?

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When we first start writing, we have no idea what all we don’t know. That uncertainty can make it difficult for us to improve.

How can we get better if we don’t know what’s holding us back? Let’s take a look at five of the most common ways we can try to improve our skills—and the strengths and pitfalls of each…

Why Is It So Hard to Improve?

As I’ve talked about before, there are four stages of competence. Our ability to recognize th...

Chapter Breaks & Titles: What Are Our Options?

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For all the blog posts and books about writing out in the world, there are comparatively few about chapters specifically. This can be surprising to new writers, as chapters form the backbone of our understanding of stories from our lifetime’s perspective as readers. *smile*

Recently, Laura Lesko emailed me with a great question about chapters:

“How does one come up with clever names for the chapters? I’ve seen some novels that are so cl...

Sentence Flow: Fixing Choppy Writing

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Whenever I think I’m nearly done with my writing and read through my work for the umpteenth time, I always experience a moment (or whole days) where I think my writing sounds too choppy. After years of experience with this phenomenon, I think I’ve figured out that it’s just a function of how my brain works when reading text I’m already extremely familiar with. At least, I hope that’s all it is. *smile*

However, sometimes our writing reall...

10th Annual Blogiversary Contest — Prize: Me! Wait…er, What?

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It’s that time of year again. My ten-year blogiversary is coming up on July 12th. Holy cow. Ten years? Really?

I think it’s now official that I’ve been blogging for forever. Or maybe after the past few years’ never-ending health issues, it just feels that way. *smile*

Once again, I’m amazed I found that much to blog about, not just in the number of posts (over 1000!) but the length of my posts. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve ...

Overwhelmed? What Do You Do? My Blog Announcement…

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I’ve often posted about how we should be kind to ourselves. That might mean ignoring advice that doesn’t work for us or giving ourselves a break if we struggle with deadlines or the many demands of our lives.

Especially in the current environment, it’s been exceedingly difficult for many to focus and get things done. So of course we might find it extra hard to balance our day jobs, family/home life, and our writing life. That tricky balancing...

4 Tips for Creating the Right Impression of Our Characters

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Last time, we started tackling the tricky problem of how to introduce our characters to readers, both with a post here and with my latest post at Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s Writers Helping Writers site. But as I’ve mentioned before, my posts at WHW are limited in word count (and if you know the length of my usual posts, that means I cut a lot of information *grin*), so let’s dig deeper today.

In my previous post here, I brought up ho...

Making a Good First Impression with Our Characters

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It’s time for another one of my guest posts over at Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s Writers Helping Writers site. As one of their Resident Writing Coaches, I’ve previously shared:

insights on how to approach an overwhelming revision
how to increase the stakes (the consequences for failure) in our story
7 ways to indicate time passage in our stories (and 2 issues to watch out for)
how to translate story beats to any genre
how and why we s...