E.M Redshaw's Blog: Storyworldofem

 

I stayed up a few nights this winter watching this view from my bed as I tried to fall asleep. And some nights I stayed up setting up my camera and tripod to try to capture the magic.

At 2am one night in March, when most of the town was asleep, I was awake with the sky dancing with flaming auroras. Waiting, holding my breath, for what felt like forever for my camera's shutter to... well, shut.

It took about a hundred blurry photos to only end up with a couple good ones.

But this photo almost perfe...

Screenshot or download this to edit yourself and share to your followers so they can get to know you!

For seven days, starting Monday, I'll be hosting a challenge for writers on instagram and other social media sites. 

Every day, I will post prompts that you can use to introduce yourself as a writer, tell us about your writing process, your current work in progress, and your writing goals for the future. To participate, simply answer each prompt on your own social media account with the hashtag #I...

I like to start writing my novels by creating a logline. It's a way to pinpoint and keep track of the core of my story and its main character, premise and plot, so that when I'm plotting, designing characters, and writing my chapters, I won't get lost in piles of notes and scenes, trying to figure out what the whole point of the story was supposed to be over and over and over again.

I can just look at my logline and it becomes instantly clear what I'm writing and what the story is supposed to be ...

But then you also won't be writing.

And you can't be a writer if you don't write. 

So at some point you've just got to accept that you will be bad. 

And what do you do then?

You write anyway.

Being a good writer is not a prerequisite for loving writing, it is a by-product of loving writing.

What's so bad about being bad anyway?

Being a bad writer doesn't prevent you from writing, and frankly, doesn't even prevent you from being published and highly successful. Not that success even matters, because the...

In Finland we call Valentines day Friend's Day, so today I'm giving some advice on how to write platonic relationships 😘

And these tips might be helpful even when you're writing romantic relationships in your stories, because to create a deep romantic relationship it may be beneficial to first make sure that your characters' relationship arc would work as a platonic relationship, and then add the romance on top of that.

These tips might really be helpful for any type of relationship in your storie...

“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce.”

- Hank Green

✨✨✨

In the past few years I haven't really focused on goal setting or productivity the way I used to pre-pandemic times.

I don't regret giving myself the rest I needed, but I have to tell myself all the time not to feel guilty, because sometimes I feel like the past two years of my life were wasted and have set me back so much in my progress towards all of my life goal...

 I'll be posting these writing advice posts on Thursdays every week from now on. If you have any suggestions of topics you'd like to see me give advice about, message me on instagram!

These blog posts contain extra tips and way more text than I can fit in an instagram post. These longer blog posts also take way more effort and lots of time to put together, so if you find them helpful, let me know and I'll keep making them.

A lovable main character elicits empathy and emotional investment from the ...

 I've never felt like I was good enough or experienced enough to give writing advice.

And I felt like giving advice would be like beating a dead horse. Everything you can learn about writing is already out there, explained by writers with way more brilliant minds than my own.

That was, until a few months ago, when I tried to get back into writing after a pretty long mental health break. I felt overwhelmed and confused, and quickly spiralled into self doubt and thought I was so bad I could never te...

"I don't love to write, but I love having written," is a quote that I could relate a lot to in the past. So what has changed? Why do I feel so completely differently about the "struggle and torture of writing" that I used to complain a lot about before?

Most people want to have done what they want to do, they don't actually want to do what they want to do.
That was a confusing sentence.
But the gist of it is that it's human nature to avoid uncomfortable and difficult things. And since writing requi...

How to instill fear, tension or anxiety in your reader?

Fear is a powerful emotion, which makes it a difficult one to achieve in prose. Instead of music or sound effects, we have descriptions of sounds and the author's voice. Instead of jumpscares, angles, cuts or shifts in colourgrading or imagery, we have paragraphs to describe the scary thing or the terrifying events. Instead of seeing an actor show a fearful expression, we have the thoughts inside the character's head. Compared to how easily...