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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
Creating Tragedy Through Human Error
One of my favorite sci-fi movies is Sunshine (07). In it, a team of highly skilled scientists is sent on a mission to our dying sun to...
Jul 23, 20243 min read
How to Make Your Writing Less Stiff Part 3
Once again, I am recirculating tried-and-true writing advice that shouldn’t have to compromise your author voice and isn’t always...
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
10 Plot Premises That Never Get Old
There’s a great many lists out there complaining about the worst and most overused tropes in fiction. I want to pass the mic to tropes...
Jul 23, 20246 min read
Incorporating weather elements into your narrative
Weather and climate as worldbuilding are kind of like adverbs. Adverbs, as a concept, are not book kryptonite (despite what all the...
Jul 23, 20244 min read
On Grimdark (Or conditioning your audience for cynicism)
Everyone has their two cents about the grimdark genre but one thing I don’t see discussed at much length
Jun 14, 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
Evil MacGuffins (Or an excuse to gush about Lord of the Rings)
It’s kind of crazy how so much of Tolkien’s worldbuilding has defined fantasy. The default for Elves and Dwarves, fantasy kingdoms,...
Jun 14, 20244 min read
Anne's Curated Tips on Worldbuilding Megapost
Some of these are not mine, they’re from author Randy Ellefson, I’m just interpreting the tips I like in my own words. These specifically...
Jun 14, 202411 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
8 Signs your Sequel Needs Work
Sequels, and followup seasons to TV shows, can be very tricky to get right. Most of the time, especially with the onslaught of sequels,...
Jun 14, 20249 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
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
Top 10 Narrative Pet Peeves
For now In one way or another, these all boil down to “Author took a shortcut and I absolutely noticed”. In other words, most of these...
May 23, 20247 min read
A Case Against “Redemption = Death”
“Redemption = Death” is, in my opinion, one of the laziest “telling not showing” cop-outs you can write, and it happens over and over and...
May 23, 20246 min read
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