One of the smallest, yet probably the most important part of character development is picking the right name. After all, your character’s very identity starts with his/her name. I’ve struggled with this ever since I started writing fiction before high school. In fact, I usually won’t even start a new fiction project until I have all the character names pinned down.

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Using a thesaurus may seem like a no-brainer for most writers. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen writing that uses the same word over and over again. I’ve seen it in blog posts, fiction, essays and just about every other type of writing you can think of. I’m guilty of this myself, and have often been embarrassed by my writing when I see a word used countless times. To combat this problem, I’m relying more and more on the good ol’ thesaurus.

Thanks to technology and the power of the internet, you don’t even need to grab that dusty book off your shelf to get a list of synonyms for frequently used words. My favorite website for finding word definitions and possible synonyms to use is dictionary.reference.com. If you use Firefox, there’s a nifty little add-on that places a search box right on the lower corner of your browser – reducing the need for bookmarks.

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Last week I wrote a post Meditate your way to better writing where I talked about how meditation can quiet the mind and give your brain a “rest.” I argued that when the mind is emptied out of all the distractions that life throws at us, it makes room to be more creative and improve your writing.

I’m continuing this theme of healthy ways to better writing (a theme I did not plan ahead of time, it just kinda happened) by talking about exercise and how it can have a positive impact on your creativity and writing. Exercise is obviously one of the most healthy activities one can pursue as it helps keep you in shape and reduces the risk of a lot of diseases.

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For novel and short story writers, life is full of distractions. We are constantly busy, trying to get as much stuff done as we can. It’s unfortunate that we live in a society that rewards those who can work the hardest and get the most done each day. Being so busy stifles creativity. The brain needs time to rest and re-group.

I’m not suggesting that writers should just sit around doing nothing all day. Of course we have other obligations; some have day jobs, family, chores, social lives and so forth. Writing is just one part of our lives. So how do we give our minds the chance to relax and unwind without becoming a lazy bum?

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Action makes your characters come alive in your fiction. Think how boring it is to read boring descriptions and dry narratives without the character actually doing anything. When I find this in my own writing and have to go back and and put my characters into action.

This boils down to that old saying ‘show, don’t tell’ (I wrote about this earlier Stephen King offers a ‘show, don’t tell’ lesson in new novel). There are effective ways to do this, and when done right, your characters will jump off the page and be more realistic.

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Stephen King’s latest magnum opus, Under the Dome: A Novel (aff link), has recently been released. If you haven’t yet made it down to your local bookstore, you might want to take a look. The novel is a brick, weighing in at a whopping 1,074 pages. I plan on reading King’s latest work eventually, but I’ll probably wait until the ebook edition is released later on this year (I only have so much shelf space and I don’t want Stephen King hogging it all).

The premise of the novel is interesting: A clear dome falls over a town and they must somehow survive the consequences of being cut off from the rest of the world. There is a great book review in the NYT – and the review is also where I got the inspiration for this post.

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Today as I was driving to run an errand it hit me that slowing down in life, not just while driving, can really help your writing. You are probably thinking “Brad has finally lost it.” Well that might be true, but here’s the premise of what I was thinking: By slowing down, you notice your surroundings more. You notice little details that you’d otherwise miss. And your brain has a chance to process all this information because you’re not running around like a maniac trying to do 20 things at once.

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One of my biggest weaknesses is writing dialogue. A lot of times, my characters ramble on about nothing and I end up cutting a lot of dialogue out while editing. So I decided to read up on how to write better dialogue so I can improve this very important element of fiction. Here’s a little of what I learned.

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One debate that continues for fiction writers is whether or not to use an outline for planning your story in advance, or to just write and let the story develop on its own. I’ve written about this at least twice before, the last time was back in July in my post More on writing without an outline. In that post I argued that maybe it is better for the story to be more spontaneous and to let it develop as it is written. But even since writing that post, I’m still sitting on the fence about whether or not to use an outline at all.

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I’ll confess that I sometimes get tangled up in the ‘active vs. passive voice’ problem. That is to say, I start using the passive voice when I really mean to use the active. A large part of this stems from some slight confusion on my part about knowing the difference between the two. After doing some some hardcore research (i.e. Google), I found some simple explanations that have helped me, and I hope will help you as well.

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