MagnusBane

Personal, handwritten journal? I'd be ticked. Also, I'd find it incredibly creepy and throw the journal out as fast as possible. Now, an online blog or something? That would be ...

Personally, I always use an outline. I try to plot out a few scenes at a time before I sit down to write. I don't outline the entire novel, because ...

George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. The first book alternates between the points of view of eight characters. The most recent novel, A Dance with ...

Personally, I try to avoid using similar names, at least for my main characters. It just makes the story easier to read. This certainly isn't the rule, though. Look at ...

58% of the adult population in the US never reads another book after high school So even if you managed to get something published, how many people are going to ...

I'm currently working on an urban fantasy story. My main character ends up working for a very old character. I'm not sure exactly what he's going to be yet (vampire ...

I don't see a problem with jumping around. Write whatever you feel like writing, even if that means that you end up working on very different types of stories. Sometimes ...

This might be a little hard to believe... but your readers don't want a ton of description. It's much better to only get a few general details about a character ...

Practice, practice, practice. That's the only way you're ever going to get better. Read books from all kinds of genres, pick up books on writing, find writing blogs that give ...

Just write. Seriously, just do it. Don't sit there and try to find the perfect word or obsess over which metaphor you should use. You can go back and edit ...

That happens to me all the time. Just type *what's the word I'm looking for?* in the place where you're stuck, even if it's mid sentence, and keep going. Then, ...

Jabber has some good advice. Also, a lot of writers like to end their chapters with cliff hangers. Of course, you shouldn't do this every time, because it just gets ...

Writer's notebooks can be a great tool. Basically, it's a place to keep track of those random thoughts and story ideas you have. It should be something that relates to ...

One of my favorite characters ever, a librarian, got hit by a bus in my last story. It was tragic.

I used to have the same problem. I'd write a page or two, and then obsess over one section and rewrite it again and again and never get anywhere at ...