What does it Mean to "Show Not Tell?"

A familiar axiom of writing is “show, don’t tell”. We hear it everywhere: from teachers, in articles, in writing workshops. For a long time, I had no idea what it actually meant. What do you mean, don’t tell? Aren’t we storytellers? My natural inclination was to sit down and tell what happened; hovering above my…

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Writer’s Block? 5 Ways to get Unstuck

    We all have days when we sit down to write and the words flow fast and furious while our fingers race to keep up. But what about the days we approach our writing time with eager anticipation only to find that we have nothing to write? Our story is stuck. Our prose is…

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Which Point of View is Right for Your Story?

Who’s telling the story? One of the most important decisions you will make when writing a novel is which point of view to use. When we started writing together, we didn’t give point of view much thought. We defaulted to a third person omniscient point of view in our first book, CIRCLE DANCE. Over the…

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Pen Pal Interview with Lisa Unger

Lynne Constantine: First of all, your book is AMAZING! I loved it so much that I didn’t want it to end. The characters were so well-drawn and the tension! So, for my first question: In THE STRANGER INSIDE, Rain struggles with what she sees as two conflicting desires: to be a good mother and to…

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Not If, But When: Persistence is Key in the Writing Game

About six years ago I became serious about pursuing my dream of a writing career. I’d written a book with my sister years earlier and had coasted on that accomplishment for the next ten years—calling myself a writer, but doing very little writing. And then I saw an ad in Writer’s Digest for Thrillerfest. I…

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