Trello is a free tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to organize ideas (not sponsored, but highly recommended). I've been using Trello to organize ideas and projects for a while, but I recently discovered how useful it is for revising a plot. A while back, I realized I needed to take out one of the characters in my WIP The Other Side of the Rainbow. More recently, I decided to rewrite the entire thing, but I still needed to figure out how to take out the character. I want

In honor of Halloween this year, my friends and I watched the movie Coraline . Since I’ve been learning how to write middle grade, I was extremely interested in how they presented the relationship between Coraline and her parents. One of the hallmarks of good middle grade fiction is when the disconnect between the adult and child perspectives is present, but the reader is able to understand and sympathize with both. A lot of writers would have taken a plot like Coraline and

As someone who loves giving feedback on writing, I’ve heard a lot of advice on how to best do that. But starting work at my college’s...

I’ve never been one to put a lot of thought into what POV to use for a story. That said, Lauren Hildebrand’s talk on choosing point of...

I tend to overthink things. So when I attended a talk on character archetypes at the Young Writer Retreat, I was extremely grateful for...

I recently reread the second part of Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell to get some guidance on how to proceed with rewriting The Everstone....

Let me start by saying this is not an exhaustive list. It would probably be impossible to make a list of all the ways to improve a plot,...

Skylar Rivers is the author of the Sky River Write blog, where she posts book reviews, writer interviews, and advice for teens. Despite...

I’ve learned from experience that both gardening and editing can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. Sometimes the weeds...

Writing can be messy. If you’re anything like me, you probably have hundreds of unorganized docs, a plethora of half-filled notebooks,...