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Beginners Ink

Weird Places to Find Character Inspiration

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The most convincing characters often come not from writing exercises but from everyday, slightly uncomfortable places — waiting rooms, queues, car parks, op shops, libraries and even local Facebook groups — where people drop their performance and reveal their habits, anxieties and tells. By observing ethically and looking for patterns in behaviour (not individuals), writers can build more believable, textured characters than any questionnaire could create.

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The Collective Pen

Ways to Kill Off Characters Without Killing Your Story

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Killing a character is easy — making that death meaningful is the real craft. Effective character deaths arise from consequence, inevitability, or choice rather than shock or author convenience. When death genuinely changes the story — its direction, relationships, or emotional stakes — it deepens narrative power; when it doesn’t, it feels hollow. Sometimes the cruelest outcome isn’t death at all, but survival with irreversible loss.

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Manuscript To Market

Visual cohesion and the quiet work of branding

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Readers decide whether a book feels credible in seconds, based largely on visual cohesion rather than content. Strong branding in books isn’t loud or flashy — it’s the quiet alignment between cover, typography, illustration, and layout. When these elements feel like they belong together, readers trust the book; when they don’t, even excellent writing can feel amateur.

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The Collective Pen

Turning Local Stories into Publishable Work

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Local stories aren’t unpublishable — they become publishable when they shift from being about a place to being about the people shaped by that place. The strongest local fiction translates lived experience into human truths that any reader can recognise, while handling recognisability, ethics, and context with care.

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Grammar and Grace

How To Stop Repeating The Same Words

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Writers worry about repeating words not because they want fancy language, but because they want to keep their natural voice. This article focuses on noticing habitual word patterns and gently expanding choices so prose stays clear and precise — more like developing editor awareness than using a thesaurus.

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Reality Check

Marketing Your Book Doesn’t Guarantee Readers

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If you published your book, promoted it, did “all the right things”, and still didn’t get traction — you didn’t fail. You ran into reality. Publishing advice loves tidy cause-and-effect stories: Do this, then that will happen. Marketing doesn’t work like that. And books definitely don’t.

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