# Style & Substance

When Spike Scarberry threw down the gauntlet, insisting structure was more important than voice, Karin Partin Wells raised her hand to battle in a public debate.

This is so important to writing good dialogue that it deserves to be on a card on your bulletin board … or at least in caps on its own line.

It’s a bumpy journey, full of twists and turns that you won’t see coming, but the last thing you should do is stop.

It’s as if people sometimes don’t have any idea what they’re doing, and yet they firmly believe that they do.

By sanding off the edges, these new versions wholly sacrificed most of the fun and audacity that made the originals so popular in the first place.

Does the benefit of moving the cathartic moment up, hooking the audience, outweigh the emotion that will come if you steel your nerves and wait?

It’s in human nature to dread pain and failure.

The classics are classics for a reason, and they’re always there to lean on to learn new techniques hidden in their brilliance.

I started to question my writing abilities, and indeed, my standing as a human being. Why was I drawn to these unlikeable people?

An age-old question hesitant creatives have asked for millenia—to explore new disciplines in the hopes of finding your niche—finally has a definitive answer ...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this world is that who you are and who people want you to be aren’t the same thing.

Michael Corleone. Ferris Bueller. Beatrix Kiddo. John Wick. What do these four famous film characters have in common, other than that they all hail from classic movies?

What Netflix's "Maid" says about America, right now, lends it the overall edge that it possesses in nearly every moment of its being.

Is anything harder in the world of fictional storytelling than coming up with an ending to a mystery that no one sees coming?

A good writer pushes the reader to draw on their common experiences and fill in as much story as is logically possible while they’re in the gutter.