Freelance Writer Program

Penn Foster. Affordable, at-home, accredited training.

Request Free Information.  Train at your own pace with Penn Foster Career School Career School.  Study online, in print, or in combination. You decide which method best suits your learning style.

Creative Writing Stratford Career Institute

Free Career Information - Creative Writing develops the knowledge and skills necessary for success as an author. It focuses on the medium of the short story and covers all phases of skillful fiction writing. Areas of concentration include theme and strategy, characters and viewpoint, plot, dialogue, and revision. Professional authors share tips and provide detailed examples.

Advice on Novel Writing

Different writers face different advantages and drawbacks in forming good writing habits. The circumstances of your personal life may make it easy or hard to find writing time, but time itself is not the real issue--it's habit. Writing must be something you do regularly, like brushing your teeth. The writer who waits for inspiration will wait even longer for a complete, published novel.

Fiction Writing and Characterization

Fiction writers generally come in two kinds: those who are strong on plot, and those who are strong on characterization. Rarely is a writer brilliant at both. Thus, even if you excel at great story premises, foreshadowing, plot twists, and careful pacing, you may still receive rejections with critiques pointing to ‘two dimensional’ or stereotyped characters; or perhaps it is your main characters’ motivations that are unclear or illogical, which ultimately sabotages the story.

10 Tips for Writing Your Mystery Novel

This isn't a definitive guide, but it will certainly help you as it helped me. Little by little, the entire process begins to make sense, becomes less daunting, and, believe it or not, becomes more fun.

Writing a Mystery

The elements of a good mystery are usually those of good atmosphere and suspense BUT if the underlying structure of the mystery is weak, all the adjectives in the world won't fix it. I have included here for your perusal a list of items that I use to help me form the underlying structure to a plot. Please enjoy.