One-note characters are a significant gripe that I have with some books, but what exactly are they? Why do I dislike them and, more importantly, how would I suggest improving them? Can these characters be redeemed? I’ll discuss all of this in today’s post: One-Note Characters (and How to Fix Them).

Almost every book—at least, every good book—has a purpose within its pages. There’s a reason it was written. There’s a reason the story is compelling or a reason the story has meaning to at least one person. It’s the nature of many great stories for their purposes to shift and change between one reader and another. One person may read a story and find that it teaches them about love and loss while another reads it and finds lessons in empathy. Neither of these readers is wrong in this, even though there is almost definitely an original intent in the work that was behind the author’s first writing.

Today, I’m going to try to be a little more positive than I was last week: I’ll be talking about five tropes that I personally enjoy in stories. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you probably already know what the first one is going to be…

ount. Today, I want to talk about some of the things that I’ve learned from writing so much (and I have written a lot). I’ll be listing five things that I wish I had known a decade ago, so this is something of a letter to the version of myself that hadn’t quite received his first writing award, yet. Hopefully, if you’re a writer who’s just starting out and looking for some help, this will be exactly what you need!

Dark content has been prevalent in stories of all kinds for a long time. However, it hasn’t always been as pervasive or in-your-face as it seems to be today. It seems like we can’t turn on a show, go see a movie, play a game, or open a book without experiencing content that’s aggressively dark or grim hitting our eyes at some point during the story. This is something I’ve seen ramping up lately, particularly with the success of shows like Game of Thrones. The question I want to ask today is… do stories need dark or controversial content? Are violence, gore, sex, drugs, trauma, and other topics that have been considered taboo in the past necessary for stories? Do they improve the stories overall, or would the stories be better if this content were cut?

Today, I want to talk specifically about reading books and how I manage to read as much as I do. I used to read a lot and have been getting back into the swing of it, which I’ve found to be a bit easier than I originally thought. In the first month of 2022, I read about 500,000 words, or a little over 100,000 words a week. I used to read even more than that! So, in today’s post, I’m going to talk about what works for me in this regard. Hopefully, you’ll be able to pull something from one or all of these tips!