Nicole Bianchi

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A Flock of One Hundred Birds (Short Story)

Published May 15, 2021 | Last Updated May 15, 2021 By Nicole Bianchi Leave a Comment

I have something a little different to share with you today: a new short story! When the spring weather arrives here in North Carolina, I always feel more creatively inspired. So here’s a spring gift for you:

A Flock of One Hundred Birds (A Short Story)

“If it hadn’t been for the war, he might never have met her. It happened on one of those nightmarish evenings when above ground the city rocked with bombs while below ground crowds of people huddled together in subway stations converted into air raid shelters. He stood alone in the wavering electric light and scanned the surrounding faces. His eyes searched for a friendly one that would allow him to exchange a few words and forget the worry that his apartment building might soon be replaced by a giant crater. Then he saw her…”

I hope you enjoy the story!

Filed Under: creativity, featured, fiction, writing

How To Use “The Hero’s Journey” in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing (video)

Published April 24, 2021 | Last Updated April 24, 2021 By Nicole Bianchi 1 Comment

I’m excited to share a new video with you today! 

It’s all about the fantastic story template called the Hero’s Journey. In this video, I look at how you can use this template for both fiction and nonfiction to make your writing more compelling and captivate your readers.

I hope you enjoy the video! It would be awesome if you could give it a thumbs up and leave a comment. Have you used the hero’s journey before or will you use it in a future piece of writing? Also make sure to subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already!

I’ve just started making YouTube videos and really appreciate your support. I hope the video inspires you with your writing. Thanks for watching! 

**RECOMMENDED RESOURCES**:

  • 📚 Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey
  • 📚 How to Come Up With Story Ideas (Video)
  • 📚 Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller
  • 📚 How to Use the Hero’s Journey to Write Blog Posts (Article)
  • 📚 My Website Copywriting Course

Some of the above links might be affiliate links. Thank you for helping to support the blog!

Filed Under: blogging, copywriting, creativity, editing, featured, fiction, inspiration, writing

3 Powerful Writing Exercises from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Steering the Craft”

Published March 29, 2021 | Last Updated March 30, 2021 By Nicole Bianchi 2 Comments

Last year, I compiled two articles sharing writing exercises from famous authors. Writing exercises give you a fantastic way to strengthen specific skills through deliberate practice. They can also help you spark new ideas for stories or memoir essays or blog posts (very helpful if you’re struggling with writer’s block!).

In response to the articles, a reader asked if I had ever read Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft, saying it was filled with a powerful set of writing exercises too.

Well, of course, I immediately put it on my to-read list. This past month I found a copy at my local library, and I dove in.

Le Guin was a sci-fi and fantasy author, but her book Steering the Craft is a useful guide for both fiction and nonfiction writers.

It deals with the nuts and bolts of the craft of writing and the subtle stylistic choices that will help you take your writing to the next level. For example, there’s a chapter on how to select the best point of view for your piece. Each chapter ends with several writing exercises so you can put into practice what you learned.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: blogging, book reviews, copywriting, creativity, editing, featured, fiction, inspiration, writing

How to Turn an Idea into a Story (Video)

Published March 11, 2021 | Last Updated September 12, 2021 By Nicole Bianchi Leave a Comment

I’m excited to share a new video with you today!

As you may know, this past year I wrote a novel. I wanted to make a series of videos sharing the storytelling tips that helped me write the novel from beginning to end and not get overwhelmed by the process. I thought you might find them helpful as well.

In this first video, I go back to the very beginning and look at the four elements you need to turn an idea into a story.

I hope you enjoy the video! It would be awesome if you could give it a thumbs up and leave a comment because this encourages YouTube to show the video to more writers on the platform. Also make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!

I’ve just started making YouTube videos and really appreciate your support. I hope the video inspires you with your writing. Thanks for watching! 

—

In his book Creating Short Fiction, award winning sci-fi writer Damon Knight observes, 

“Even when you begin with an abstract idea, you must follow it to a character, a setting, a situation, and an emotion before there can be a story.” 

This fantastic quote gives us the four different categories that story ideas can fall into. Once you have all four of those categories, you have a solid foundation to begin telling a gripping story.

Do you have a story idea in your head right now? Let’s break it down and see which of the categories it fits into: character, setting, situation, or emotion.

First, for example, you might have an idea for a character. You’ve written down this character’s backstory. You know their family tree. You know their personality. Maybe you’ve even drawn a picture of them or found a photo on Google. Or maybe you’ve used one of the character development exercises in my article here.

But you don’t have a story yet. You just know this character really well, and you think that it would be a character that your readers would care about.

Second, you might have an idea for a setting. Maybe you are like J.R.R Tolkien, and you’ve come up with this really detailed fantasy world with different peoples and creatures and even languages. Maybe you have a Pinterest board of your story’s aesthetic. But that’s also not a story yet, even though it might be a captivating setting that readers would love to become immersed in.

Third, you might have an idea for a situation. This would be where you might think, “Oh, I’d like to write a story about somebody who finds a million dollars.” It’s an intriguing premise, but you still need to have a character and a setting. Your story would be very different if it was sci-fi, for example, versus historical fiction. (My short story “The Lost Diamond” was first inspired by an idea for a situation: “What would happen if someone lost a diamond ring?”)

Fourth, you could have an idea that is an emotion. Maybe you say, “I really want to write a story where the character feels revenge. I want to explore that emotion in my story.” The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, is a book all about a character seeking vengeance. Or maybe you want to explore jealousy or love. You say to yourself, “I really just want to write a love story.” You have a scene in your head of a character experiencing that emotion, but you don’t know who the protagonist is or the villain or the setting or the situation.

Essentially, when you only have one of these four elements, it’s like having one puzzle piece, but you can’t complete the puzzle until you have all four. Once you have all four, you can develop your idea into a fully fleshed out story.

So let’s see this in action. 

Let’s say, for example, you came up with an idea that you wanted to write a story that was about an emotion. And the emotion is that the character is going to discover that their entire life is a lie. You want explore how this emotion changes them and their life, what they experience in their soul, and how they react. Of course, your story can take lots of different directions depending on what setting you choose, who you choose as your character, and what situation you choose. 

It could end up being a drama if your character is a woman and finds out, for example, that her husband’s been cheating on her. She thought she had a wonderful life and now she sees it was actually a lie. But maybe you don’t want to write a drama.

You decide that you want to write a futuristic, dystopian story. You develop a sci-fi setting and have fun creating that world. Then you decide for your character you want to choose a computer hacker. For your situation, you write that your character finds out that he is living in a computer simulation. But whoops! You’ve just written the basic plot of The Matrix. You’ll have to tweak each element to make sure its unique and not just copying that story.

So you can see that this exercise is also helpful at showing you whether you’re just copying the plot of a popular book or movie. You’ll be able to go back and spend time on each of the four categories to make them unique for your story. 

The exercise also helps you to see if you need to develop your character more or your setting. Or maybe you need to write a more compelling problem for your character to face in the situation.

Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into actually developing this idea further so you can turn it into a fleshed-out story, but this is the first step: to put all of these four different elements together.

At this point, it’s really helpful if you choose the genre of your story too. What kind of a story are you’re going to be writing: murder mystery, romance, fantasy? Think about the stories in those genres and what elements they usually include. For example, in a murder mystery, your detective might have a companion, like Sherlock Holmes’ Watson.

You can also decide whether you’re writing a short story or a novel. This will help you determine how long your story should be. A fantasy epic is going to be much longer than a middle grade novel.

But, of course, you don’t need to spend too much time thinking about all that just yet. You might decide to write a short story now, and it later turns into a novel.

What you really want to focus on first is making sure you have a character, a setting, a situation, and an emotion. 

Once you have all those, you’re ready to begin plotting. Then you can check out my video on ‘The Hero’s Journey’, a super-easy way to begin plotting a story.

Filed Under: creativity, featured, fiction, inspiration, motivation, video, writing

A Tale of a Fox and a Novel: On Taking the Leap and Submitting Your Writing

Published March 5, 2021 | Last Updated March 7, 2021 By Nicole Bianchi 3 Comments

This past year I finished writing a novel. Back when I was working on the first draft, a fox somehow got into the second chapter. I hadn’t planned it. He appeared for only a few fleeting paragraphs before darting off. 

I wasn’t sure why he was in the story, but I decided to keep him. And I ended up writing him another appearance in the final act.

Fast forward many months later and many drafts later. I was debating whether I wanted to eventually self publish the novel or first try to get it traditionally published. But was it even ready to send out to literary agents? 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: creativity, featured, inspiration, motivation, writing

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Hi, I’m Nicole! I help creatives, business owners, and writers take their writing and copywriting to the next level and grow their online audience. I’m also a published writer of essays and short stories. As a Christian, I seek to follow in the tradition of artists like Johann Sebastian Bach, dedicating all my work Soli Deo gloria.
Find out more about me here.
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“My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.”
– Psalm 45:1

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