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Intro Unless you’re writing something that takes place in the real world, with absolutely no made-up locations added to it, you’re going to have to do a bit of worldbuilding. Whether your story’s set in the modern world in a made-up town, or on a totally different planet, it’s important to have at least a…
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Intro Fall is now in full swing, so I thought it would be a good time to share one of my favorite fall reads. Plus, there’s a fair amount of creepiness in it as well, making it great for spooky season. If you’re a fan of YA fantasy, you’ve almost certainly heard of Six of…
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Intro I’m just going to go right out and say that I love writing action scenes. Whether they’re fight scenes, chase scenes, or anything in between, they’ve always been one of my favorite things to write. They pretty much guarantee excitement and also often serve as a great place to show how characters act under…
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Intro As someone who loves superheroes, I’m happy that superhero novels are slowly becoming more and more common, to the point where even a bestselling author like Marissa Meyer wrote not just one but a whole trilogy of them. While Renegades definitely isn’t quite as popular as the Lunar Chronicles, it is regarded highly by…
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Intro One of the most common writing questions I see online is how to write a character who is a different gender from you—especially a main character. And I think it’s great that people are trying to be more conscious and respectful when it comes to writing characters who aren’t the same gender as them,…
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While it’s not as well-known as most of the other books I’ve featured on the blog so far, Virals was one of the first YA series that I fell in love with. Written by crime writer and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs—and her son Brendan Reichs later in the series—it’s full of mystery, action, humor, and…
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Intro If you’re a writer on social media, you’ve probably seen all sorts of accounts posting writing advice pretty much daily, telling you the many dos and don’ts of this particular creative pursuit. Most of these are pretty common, repeated over and over again by multiple different accounts, but others are less so. Today, I’m…
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The Maze Runner is one of the more well-known YA action/adventure books, highly acclaimed for its heart-pounding action and shocking twists. From the very beginning, it’s rife with mysteries and questions waiting to be answered. Despite its popularity, I actually only recently started reading the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I…
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Writing good dialogue is one of the most important things that fiction writers have to know how to do, at least in my opinion. Not only is dialogue one of—if not the—best way to give the reader information about the plot, world, and characters, but it’s also a lot of what makes the characters feel…
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Legend has been a favorite of mine ever since I first read it during my early teens. Packed with action, intrigue, and a nice side of romance, it’s one of the first books that I think of when I think of YA, so it was pretty much guaranteed to be among the first reading recommendations…