Nicole Bianchi

Writing, Copywriting, & Marketing Strategies

How to Write Like C. S. Lewis (Video)

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Happy New Year! Let’s start the year with some wonderful writing advice from C. S. Lewis. I just uploaded this new video to the Youtube channel.

In 1950, C. S. Lewis wrote a letter to a young fan of his Chronicles of Narnia series. He critiqued the fan’s writing and also shared his five rules for writing well.

I previously shared Lewis’s advice in a blog post, but now I have updated and expanded that post and turned it into this video.

You can click on the CC button for subtitles. My goal is for this video to help as many writers as possible. Be sure to give it a thumbs up on YouTube as this encourages the algorithm to share it with more people. 

And I always love hearing your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Writing Exercise (Video)

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Let’s start this year with some wonderful writing advice from Ernest Hemingway.

I’ve just uploaded a new YouTube video sharing Hemingway’s 3-step exercise that will help you improve your writing. I hope this video gives you a bit of inspiration as you work towards your 2023 writing goals.

An aspiring writer once asked Ernest Hemingway, “How can a writer train himself?” Hemingway shared an exercise for sharpening a writer’s observational skills so they can vividly describe their experiences on paper. This exercise can be broken down into three-steps and gives us a fantastic way to practice “show, don’t tell” in our writing.

You can click on the CC button for subtitles. My goal is for this video to help as many writers as possible. 🙂 It would be awesome if you could give it a thumbs up on YouTube and share it with a fellow writer. And I always love hearing your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!

Here’s the full text of Hemingway’s article “Monologue to the Maestro”.

**FURTHER RESOURCES**:

How to Create Story Conflict: The Conflict Triangle with the Stakes Character (Video)

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Are you having trouble ratcheting up the tension in a story so your readers don’t lose interest after the first several pages?

Or maybe you’re struggling to give your protagonist a convincing character arc where her personality transforms over the course of your story so readers care about what happens to her?

Or perhaps you’re trying to weave a message into your story, but you don’t want it to sound preachy or unconvincing?

In today’s article, I’m going to show you how to solve all those problems with a storytelling technique called “the conflict triangle”.

This technique isn’t just for fiction writers. If you’re a nonfiction writer who wants to tell better stories in your ads or articles, this technique can help you too.

Prefer watching to reading? Watch the video version of this article (with bonus examples):

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F. Scott Fitzgerald on How to Write Vivid Character Descriptions (Video)

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If you’re celebrating Christmas next week, I hope you have a lovely, joy-filled holiday. If you don’t celebrate or if this is a difficult time for you, I wish you peace and happiness this December.

And I have a writing gift for you — I’ve just uploaded a new YouTube video:

In this video, I look at how F. Scott Fitzgerald writes vivid physical character descriptions in The Great Gatsby. I share four strategies that will help you describe people in both fiction and nonfiction so they come alive for readers.

I hope you enjoy this last writing resource of 2021! Be sure to give it a like, leave a comment (comments are awesome), and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one in the new year.

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How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo: 7 Helpful Resources

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Amelia Bartlett on Unsplash

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is nearly here. If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo before, it’s a 30-day challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.

Now, that’s the official challenge, but I love adapting NaNoWriMo to my own writing goals. It’s a fantastic way to motivate yourself to make progress or get started on any writing project (fiction or nonfiction) that you’ve been procrastinating over.

I’ve put together this article rounding up lots of resources I’ve created over the years to help you crush your writing goals this upcoming month, whether you’re taking part in the challenge or not. Let’s dive in.

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