You’ve Got Main Character Energy

Do kids these days still talk about main character energy? It was used for awhile as both a compliment and insult–compliment when noticing that someone was confident and taking charge of their life, insult when someone was acting like the world revolved around them.
It was the only time popular culture was talking about main characters almost as much as we writers do.
Because we talk about them a lot.
https://writerunboxed.com/2026/04/17/youve-got-main-character-energy/

#Fictiontherapy #perseverance #Writinglife #fear #maincharacterenergy

The Ethics of AI in Writing

There was a discussion recently on an editors’ group about whether to work on AI-generated content or not. Everyone who commented, more than 70 people, said that they would not.
Some of the editors refused to be the ones who would “put the humanity” into the words since that should be the responsibility of the person who would ultimately benefit from the text. Others commented that the text was often not up to a standard they would accept anyway, AI-generated or not.
The discussion was pertinent since Hachette cancelled a novel recently that was said to have been written at least partly by AI. The author claims that an editor friend had introduced these AI generated parts of the text.
https://writerunboxed.com/2026/04/10/the-ethics-of-ai-in-writing/

#ArtificialIntelligence #Editing #Fictiontherapy #ChatGPT #CRAFT

Let’s Be Clear, Period

Lynne Truss, the respected author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves , once said: “There are people who embrace the Oxford comma, and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.”
I hope you’re all sober because we’re going to get into this.
Let me start with a meme that has become popular on social media.
We invited two strippers, JFK and Stalin.
Does this sentence refer to four people in total or are JFK and Stalin about to get naked?
It’s difficult to be sure when it’s written like that.
But if you read:
We invited two strippers, JFK, and Stalin.
Here, you could be pretty sure there are four people. Pretty sure. But you could still have some doubts.
If you got rid of the bad writing and read:…
https://writerunboxed.com/2026/02/18/lets-be-clear-period/

#Editing #Fictiontherapy #adviceforwriters #CRAFT #editing

Creativity in Brevity

It’s very difficult to tell a story in just a few hundred words, to fit in all the elements that go into a good, rounded tale, to develop a plot with a setting, character development and a theme, for example.
https://writerunboxed.com/2025/10/13/creativity-in-brevity/

#Fictiontherapy #adviceforwriters #characters #CRAFT #creativity

Obsess Much? Welcome to Your Best Fiction Ingredients

…
https://writerunboxed.com/2025/07/14/obsess-much-welcome-to-your-best-fiction-ingredients/

#AuthorinProgress #Community #Fictiontherapy #perseverance
@indieauthors