Category: Writer

How do you structure and weave various storylines together? How do you shift between storylines and immediately orient readers without confusing them? How do you invest readers deeply in each one—and keep them invested throughout? What merits a separate storyline—and what’s just backstory?

In this 90-minute live webinar, career book editor Tiffany Yates Martin will bring her decades of experience to exploring all these questions and more, dissecting the structure and techniques of published novels to demonstrate these principles in action.

The “Writer’s Digest Presents” podcast returns this Tuesday, September 16, with a brand-new episode and brand-new look! Catch up on the latest episodes now so you’re not behind!

Time management can be one of the most difficult things to navigate as a writer. Feeling inspired and having great ideas don’t mean much if you can’t find the time to sit down and write, or if you feel tired or rushed when your writing slot rolls around. Time management isn’t one-size-fits-all.  

How you manage your writing time and where you fit it into your busy schedule will be different for everyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s all up to you to figure it out on your own. Being intentional about how you schedule and use your writing time is key.  

For example, back when I was a full-time news producer, I made time for writing after work. It was a priority for me, and I carved out an hour here and there each week to work on my first book, Listful Living. Then, when I became a media trainer and productivity expert, my schedule changed. I could design my workday on my own terms and so my writing time changed too. I decided that Fridays would be my writing days, and I made it a priority not to schedule meetings on Fridays. Those days are reserved for my writing accountability meetings and solo writing time.  

The key here is being flexible and assessing what your life looks like right now. Maybe you made a plan for your writing time a few years ago and now that doesn’t work anymore because of work or family obligations.  

For example, if evenings are your writing time, you might find that you’re too tired and you can only get a few words down each night. Try moving your writing time to the morning for a month and see what changes. Or vice-versa! Life has seasons and your time management approach has to shift with them to be most effective.  

When you have your writing time and space figured out (yep, making sure your environment is supporting you with limited distractions is key), return to some of those structured techniques like deadlines, assignments, and Pomodoro. You might find that switching up your approach every so often helps. Or, you might benefit from keeping things consistent. Every writer is different, and it’s important to be mindful of your own needs and habits as you work on boosting your writing speed.  

Across cultures, stories have always been part of how we heal. In Punjabi households, for centuries grief has found its way into songs we sing, even those sung at weddings. In some Kashmiri folktales, ghosts and fairies speak truths history books conveniently forget. In Indigenous traditions across North America, storytelling circles remain sacred sites of collective healing, where children, elders, and ancestors gather to share generations after generations.

These stories weren’t just entertainment. They were tools for survival. A way of carrying memory forward when it was too dangerous or too raw to share in its purest form.

Fiction, in many ways, is a contemporary extension of that tradition.

Trauma fragments memory. It leaves us with these jagged pieces that don’t seem to fit together. Psychologists talk about “narrative repair”—the process of sequencing those fragments into something coherent, something survivable.

Fiction offers a similar pathway. When we read about a character’s struggle, our brains engage in exercising our resilience muscles from a safe distance. We recognize pain and can empathize without being consumed by it. We can test out what forgiveness could look like, without having to risk it in our own lives first.

And when we write fiction, we’re doing a form of narrative therapy without calling it that. We take experiences that feel impossible to name and place them into the hands of characters who can hold them. We move them around, we reimagine them, we give them endings our real lives may not yet allow.

Science backs all of this up. Neuroscientists have shown that when we read a story, our brains don’t just process the words. They light up as if we are living the experience. A story about running activates the motor cortex. A story about grief activates the same areas that fire does when we grieve.

This is why fiction can feel so visceral. It’s not just that we “relate” to characters. It’s that our brains are experiencing their journeys almost as if they were our own. Which means fiction has the ability to rehearse healing in us, alongside attempting it in our real lives.

Publication, however, motivated me to persist, which led to my signing with a literary agent— Maria Napolitano of KT Literary—which led to my two-book deal with Agora Books. Publishing with an imprint known for its inclusive vision felt special.

In 2013, publishing veteran Jason Pinter founded Polis Books, which specialized in crime fiction. Chantelle Aimée Osman, another publishing veteran, pitched him the idea of Agora Books, which was launched in 2019 as an imprint of Polis Books. Pinter and Osman, who ran Agora Books as editor, did what other publishers often say they want to do but never quite do—to publish diverse authors and new voices.

Explaining Agora Books’s mission at a Crime Writers of Color webinar in May 2024, Osman said, “I was tired of seeing the same viewpoint expressed over and over. There are so many viewpoints and stories out there that need to be in the mainstream as well.”

Agora Books was the bridge that took writers of color like me inside the arguably exclusivist and elitist traditional publishing industry. This is not to say that my publishing journey became easier.

By the time Multo, book one of my series, was published in September 2023, I had weathered a critical disruption. Osman, who acquired my series, left Agora Books for another publishing house, which meant I changed editors in midstream. Such job changes are common in an industry always in a state of flux.

I rode out the stresses of the editing process and unexpected developments by focusing on what was ahead of me—marketing and promotion of Multo. I was fully aware that I had to do the heavy lifting.

Agora Books, like most independent presses, didn’t have a PR person, so I hired my own publicist. Even before Multo was launched, I spoke at writing conferences and book events. After it was published, I wrote articles for media outlets and gave interviews to podcasters and book bloggers. Before the end of 2023, my agent submitted book two of my series with an eye on publication in 2024.

For the next few months after publication, I was immersed in book promotion while waiting for my publisher to decide when book two would be published. The decision never came. In March 2024—six months after Multo was published—Polis Books and Agora Books went out of business. In hindsight, there were telltale signs of problems at Agora Books, but I chose not to dwell on them.

In a complete reversal of fortune, Osman, who was then an editor at Amazon Publishing, acquired my series for Thomas & Mercer three months after Agora Books closed. Looking at my experience in the rearview mirror, I can say honestly that it has taught me valuable lessons that made me a stronger person.

Actress and writer Bella Zoe Martinez discusses how she has put her creative talents to use to flip the script on Autistic characters, and those working behind the scenes.

In the modern age, the line between hero and villain has grown increasingly blurred. Anti-heroes, anti-villains, evil protagonists, and justified antagonists have turned the traditional moral framework of fiction into a rich, and sometimes confusing, tapestry.

And yet, even if it is more a suggestion than a rule, all these descriptions require a line to be drawn somewhere, and the question of what separates a hero from a villain, sits at the heart of the stories we tell. In that short dialogue, between these two iconic adversaries, I encountered the essence of what separates Holmes from Moriarty, and as my writing faced me with the question of what makes James Moriarty the villain he is, I found, in that interchange, all the answers I needed.

The first major difference between heroes and villains is their capacity for self-sacrifice.

In the show Game of Thrones, it’s said of Lord Petyr Baelish that “he would see this country burn if he could be king of the ashes.” As that quote alone illustrates, Lord Baelish has no ideals that he would consider dying for. Villains can have their ideas, their schemes, but at a fundamental level they sit at the center of those plans.

Moriarty, despite all his intellect, can’t fathom, that someone would hold their ideals above their personal survival, whereas Holmes will “cheerfully accept” his own death in pursuit of a higher goal.

In the battle of wits between Holmes and Moriarty, which so often plays to a stalemate, it’s perhaps the greatest edge that Holmes, and heroes like him, has. Moriarty needs to win, but Holmes, representing something greater than himself, can settle for both of them losing.