dawn.vogel | May 12, 2025
I’ve been working through the writing exercises in the appendices of Wonderbook, after having gone through the chapters, but I’ve recently made the decision to not complete all of those exercises. I found the text of Wonderbook very useful to me, and I wound up highlighting and flagging a lot of material that I know I’ll […]
dawn.vogel | May 5, 2025
There’s a lot of writing advice that tells authors to remove passive voice, adverbs, and more. And while these things can be useful ideas to keep in mind when you’re editing your writing, there’s a lot more nuance to these “rules” than is initially apparent. Some people take “remove passive voice” to mean “never use […]
dawn.vogel | April 28, 2025
If you’re writing a character with a secret, how might you portray that through your writing? The Character Secret Thesaurus from Writers Helping Writers is a great place to start! The Character Secret Thesaurus is a database in progress that presents a number of secrets a character might be keeping, along with specific details that […]
dawn.vogel | April 21, 2025
Recently, I’ve been helping out the fine folks at The Dream Foundry to prepare, post, and promote some of the panel videos from the 2023 Flights of Foundry online convention. New content goes up every Wednesday, and most of the videos are available for six months after they’re posted. (Some remain up for an unlimited […]
dawn.vogel | April 14, 2025
Last Monday, I talked about external character conflicts, and how those are the sort of “conflict” that many authors are thinking of when they talk about the subject. At the end of that post, I started to dip a little bit into internal character conflicts, which is what I’m talking about today. Most people have […]
dawn.vogel | April 7, 2025
When most authors talk about the need for “conflict” to drive a story, they’re talking about external character conflicts. Most often, this is distilled down even further to a protagonist vs. an antagonist. And while that’s certainly one way to generate conflict to drive a story, it’s not the only option! External character conflicts can […]
dawn.vogel | March 31, 2025
During the gaming convention I was at recently, I played in a couple of games that involved a lot of collaborative storytelling. It was fun for me to get to stretch some of my writing muscles in a setting where I wasn’t writing down the results, but rather working with other people to shape the […]
dawn.vogel | March 10, 2025
I recently wrote a lot of flash fiction stories for a casual contest. My stories were all over the place in terms of topics, including a medieval Catholic saint, mushrooms, seventh century Korean and Chinese history, and tea leaf reading, and a few people commented on the breadth of topics, trivia, and knowledge. But as […]
dawn.vogel | March 3, 2025
I spent a few hours recently rearranging my writing desk area, so I have a new desk area setup. After some disbelief of this on BSky, I decided to do a little desk tour of the new setup! My desk area is about half of our dining room table, tucked in the little nook of […]
dawn.vogel | February 24, 2025
Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! The panel on “Fashion in Worldbuilding” talked about the different ways that clothing can be used not only […]
