Wednesday links: A writing exercise

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few. Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. A Writing Exercise to Help You Raise the Stakes for Your Characters, from WOW! Women on Writing: Does it seem like there just isn’t enough at stake for your characters? This writing exercise may be able to help. Excerpt: “In genre novels, especially, the characters need to have something to lose, and the stakes have to be high, or your readers won’t bother to get to the end–because they know how it will end–happily ever after. So the meat of the story needs to be the beginning and middle, where you introduce the characters and explore the stakes.”