They share below some great tips for writers:

We've stuck with our writing objectives so far this year; have you?  Or, as with so many New Year's Resolutions, has your motivation wavered and your momentum slowed?  Get back to it!  This is the year to make it happen.  

Are You Ready to Draft Your Story Arc?

The story arc (or sometimes called the narrative arc) is a more poetic way of saying that each story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end—or Act One, Act Two, and Act Three. This has been the guiding template of stories since the ancient Greeks started writing them, and holds true whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction.

Where authors fall apart in their story arc is that nothing much happens to the main character by the end of the book. He hasn’t been tested in some profound way.

Your story arc and character arc should be melded together in such a way you’re not sure where one begins and the other ends. As your main character is tested, has endured, and is changed in a climactic way throughout the story arc, she naturally changes as a character by the end of the story.

Learn more about drafting your story arc. 

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How to Create Your Story’s World

No matter what genre you write in, you need to build a world for your story. Every writer needs to build a world so that your readers can have a placeholder to figure out the context in which your story is set.

If you’re writing a current-day story, you should know where the story is set and what’s happening in the world around your main characters. Imagine the movie Forest Gump without the political and cultural wrangling that goes on all around him. Without that story’s world, Forest would have been a seriously flat character.

If you’re writing science fiction or supernatural stories, world building is extremely important. The more fantastical your setting, the more time you’ll need to spend developing it. Consider The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy—even Star Wars. Without those rich and textured worlds, the main characters wouldn’t have had the experiences that made those stories come alive.

Read more about creating your story's world here.