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WELCOME TO ANNE BELLOWS BOOKS
The Writing Tips Blog of Many Colors
The new home of my Tumblr blog! Here you can find my curated tips on the writing process. Everything from worldbuilding and character design to story structure, themes, and tackling those tough tropes and archetypes, with a few top ten lists sprinkled about.
Segway Characters (Or when your protagonist knows jack about the story)
This is the protagonist of a sci-fi or fantasy world, generally a nobody who gets dragged in either by circumstance or by being the...
Jul 23, 20245 min read
Your colloquialisms are ruining the immersion (or, non-contemporary dialogue)
I am no expert here! Whenever I wrote historical fiction it was anachronistic historical fiction. This advice is from a reader’s...
Jul 23, 20244 min read
Bringing Characters Back from the Dead Without Pissing Off Your Audience
I don’t know if there’s an emotional rollercoaster out there quite shaped like an audience bawling their eyes out over the death of a...
Jul 23, 20246 min read
Another 5 Character Types the World Needs More of (Part 3)
1. Character who is immune to everyone else’s bullshit This can either be funny or a breath of fresh air. I’m talking your drama cast of...
Jul 23, 20244 min read
Checklist of character traits prone to inconsistency:
It’s great to give a lot of detail to character traits and personality quirks, but they aren’t real people, you’ve made them up, and...
Jul 23, 20243 min read
On Writing Characters That Don't Or Can't Speak English
This such a fun dynamic, honestly and more fantasy and sci-fi should implement it. You don’t even have to design a fantasy language,...
Jul 23, 20247 min read
How to Make Clean Romance Entertaining
There’s more to a relationship to explore between your characters than just how good each other is in the bedroom. Here’s a few suggestions
Jun 14, 20244 min read
25 Cheap and Easy Tricks for Naming Your Characters
Because I hate coming up with new names. I hate it. I write fantasy. Why do I do this to myself? The credits of your favorite movies,...
Jun 14, 20241 min read
Villain Power Scaling (It's over 9000!)
Quick! We wrote an insanely, unexpectedly successful one-off fantasy series! How do we top the villain? A bigger, badder giant space...
Jun 14, 20247 min read
Exposition 2: Naming New Characters (Or, The Pronoun Game)
This post is brought to you by one of the worst line deliveries in the history of Supernatural: Sam’s reveal of Ruby 2.0 in “Lazarus...
Jun 14, 20245 min read
10 More Character Types the World Needs More of
1. Fiercely independent character’s lesson isn’t to “trust people” I’m not projecting. You’re projecting. There is a divide wide enough...
Jun 14, 20247 min read
The Hero with Dead Parents is not Cliché, it’s Necessary
The staggering number of protagonists in sci-fi and fantasy with dead parents grows every single year. Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, Luke...
Jun 14, 20243 min read
Tackling Characters with Mental Health Issues (or, ‘Write What you Know’)
Trigger warning for this entire post This is completely off the cuff and unplanned but here we go. I read a book that POV switches...
Jun 14, 20246 min read
Take A Risk and Don’t Write a Chosen One
This trope stands the test of time for some very good reasons: Audience wish-fulfillment as they live vicariously through the hero,...
Jun 14, 20244 min read
The Ace Character Guide
I am firmly in the “you don’t need to be part of X minority to write characters in X minority” camp. If we didn’t celebrate people...
May 23, 20246 min read
10 Character Dynamics the World Needs More of
Me handing out character dynamics like free samples at the Mall Food Court: “Take one! Or two! You’ll love it!” I don’t care how many...
May 23, 20245 min read
Humanizing Your Characters (And Why You Should)
To humanize a character is not to contort an irredeemable villain into the warped funhouse mirror reflection of a hero in the last 30...
Mar 29, 202412 min read
Character Descriptions 101 (Or, the ugly truth about what really matters)
A lot of the appeal of being able to write your own book is being able to take all the characters you dream about and put them onto paper...
Mar 29, 202412 min read
Color in Fiction! (Once You See it, You Cannot Unsee it)
White versus black, red versus blue, Gatsby’s green light, Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, Belle’s blue dress. Color is perhaps the most...
Mar 29, 20249 min read
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