We’re honored to welcome Scrivener as a sponsor of Florida WritersCon 2025, held on October 17–19, 2025 in Orlando, FL. For writers around the globe, Scrivener has become the trusted companion for tackling long-form writing projects—from bestselling novels to student theses, from screenplays to legal briefs. About Scrivener Scrivener is the go-to app for writers. Used by bestselling novelists and new writers alike, no matter how you like to write or what you’re writing, Scrivener unites everything you’ll need to … Read More »

If you think of the plotline of the novel as a geography, some of them are full of hills and dales and others are as flat as Florida. Lets call “hills” the moments of suspense, fear, or angry confrontation that spice up the horizon. “Flatlands” would be the emotionally level parts where the story chugs along. The best plots have both features, so we can’t call one better than the other—but if I only got one of them, I’d want … Read More »

We all love novels full of sensory detail—the rhythmic pulse of crickets. The opalescent colors of a summer twilight. Sight, in particular, is the chief organ we turn on the world, unless we’re unfortunate enough to have lost that faculty. We go through the world seeing things, noticing. From our primeval origins in the trees, it’s that ability that has made us safer and let us catch our prey. After that comes hearing. We get many of our signals from … Read More »

Interviewers have frequently asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” — as if there were some mysterious wellspring from which imagination bubbles that spews out a whole plotted book. We can call this inspiration. Where does it come from? In fact, in the deeper sense, that’s not an easy question to answer. I certainly don’t understand the workings of my own brain well enough to say what childhood encounter might have spawned a certain character. But since I write … Read More »

In February and March I addressed good openings for almost any kind of writing here at the FWA blog. And in April we meandered in the middle of poems. So now, let’s talk about how to nail the perfect ending to a poem. (I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a bit of a rant. Bad endings to good poems drive me crazy!) Perhaps the most egregious crime of bad poetry is when the poet tries to … Read More »

As my friends (and probably my readers) can tell you, I’m no enemy to baroque language. I do love me some rich descriptions! But that’s not the same as wasting words, throwing them away on redundancies. While not everybody needs to write like Ernest Hemingway, a certain frugality with those precious little words keeps the writing clean and comprehensible. Let’s consider a few examples. Stating the Obvious Take the adverb aloud. It’s useful to indicate that something is not silent. … Read More »