Welcome to the Write With Seth Blog!
I post writing advice, tips, and techniques every week.
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Discovery Writing: What It Is, Why It Works, and How to Try It
Some of the best novels ever written were never outlined.
Stephen King famously compares writing to excavation — you don’t build a story, you uncover it, like a fossil. Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Alice Walker — all discovery writers. All writers who began with a character or a situation or a question and let the story find[…]
Find Your Prose Rhythm: How to Write Description That Keeps Readers Turning Pages
The books readers can’t put down don’t just have great plots or compelling characters. They have prose that moves. Sentences that flow into each other so naturally that the reader stops noticing the words and starts living inside the scene.
That’s what prose rhythm does. And once you understand how it works, you can hear when yours[…]
The Other Half of the Verb Problem: Who’s Doing the Action?
The books readers get lost in — the ones where you look up and an hour has passed — put you inside a character’s experience. You’re not watching from outside. You’re in the body, feeling what they feel, seeing what they see.
A lot of what creates that effect comes down to verbs, and if you’ve been[…]
When Revision Gets Fun: The Gold Already Waiting in Your Pages
You’ve finished your draft. You’ve done the structural work — you know what the book is, how the pieces connect, where things need to move. And now you’re back inside the scenes themselves.
This is where revision stops feeling like repair work and starts feeling like discovery again – and fun!
Because here’s what most writers[…]
The Backwards Outline: Why the Best Revision Tool Comes After Your First Draft
You finished your draft. Maybe it took six months. Maybe it took three years. And now you’re looking at this sprawling, imperfect, occasionally brilliant mess of pages, and you’re not sure what to do with it.
Here’s what I’d tell you to do: outline it.
Not before you write the next draft. Not to plan what[…]
You Already Know the Concepts. Here’s What’s Actually Missing.
Most writers who come to me aren’t starting from zero.
They’ve read the craft books. They’ve taken the workshops. They know what showing and telling means. They’ve heard about scene versus summary, about the importance of grounding your reader, about strong verbs and weak ones. They can talk about structure, about character arc, about pacing.
They[…]
What Writers Are Saying About Working With a Coach (Early Findings)
A few weeks ago I put out a short survey: if you’ve worked with a writing coach, editor, or course — mine or anyone else’s — I wanted to hear about it. What it cost. What changed. What you’d tell another writer before they signed up for anything.
This isn’t a finished report. It’s a growing one[…]
Sentence Structure in Fiction: How to Write Stronger Scenes One Sentence at a Time
What Is Sentence Structure?
Sentence structure in fiction is how you put together your words, phrases, clauses, and use sentence lengths to control a reader’s experience. Novelists use sentence structure to shape pacing, build tension, emphasize important moments, and develop narrative voice.
The most important element of Sentence Structure is control. To keep your reader connected, it’s important to use sentences you can[…]
How to Revise a Novel: Start With Structure, Not Sentences
You finished your draft. Maybe it was last week. Maybe it was last year. Maybe it’s been sitting in a folder for longer than you’d like to admit.
Either way, you’re in the same place a lot of writers find themselves: you have pages, and you don’t quite know what to do with them next.
I[…]
How to Pants Your Way to a Novel
The middle path between plotting and pantsing that actually gets books finished.
“Once we really got into it, I actually found the outlining kind of annoying,” a client told me recently. She’d tried detailed plotting systems, character worksheets, and extensive planning documents. “It’s like, no, I guess I’m just going to sit down and write and see[…]
What I Taught at Novel Summer Camp (And What You Can Still Use)
Last week I had the privilege of joining ProWritingAid’s Novel Summer Camp for a live workshop on pacing — one of the most fundamental and most misunderstood tools in a fiction writer’s kit.
The session is recorded, and you can watch it below. But I also want to give you the core ideas in writing, because some things land better on[…]
Why Is Writing Fiction So Hard?
If you’ve been working on your novel for a while—and I mean really working, not just thinking about it—you’ve probably had this feeling at least once:
I know how to write. Why is this so hard?
Maybe you were an English student who always did well. Maybe you wrote papers in college that got praised. Maybe you have a graduate degree, a[…]
Make Readers See Your Scenes
The Best Books Make Readers See Their Scenes.
Yours Can, Too.
There’s a reason certain books get finished and certain books get put down.
It’s not the premise. It’s not the genre. It’s not even the writing, exactly — not in the way most people[…]
The Books Readers Trust All Share This
For more about writing a book readers can’t put down, read this post first.
There’s a reason certain books get recommended and certain books get quietly abandoned.
It’s not always the plot. It’s not always the prose. Often it’s something subtler, something readers feel before they can name it: they don’t trust the characters. They don’t believe what[…]
