I’m excited for the classes we’ve lined up for the fourth quarter of the year, because they all work together to help you design great stories. Developing Sympathetic Characters — October 6, 2025, 7 p.m. • How to create characters that readers can care about Plot Pitfalls — November 18, …
Author: Kristen Stieffel
Kristen Stieffel is a writer and freelance editor specializing in speculative fiction. She's a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, Christian Editor Connection, and American Christian Fiction Writers.
Online Writing Classes August–September 2025
The Orange County Library System here in Central Florida holds writing classes over Zoom, so anyone anywhere may attend. The Library Card field on the registration form is optional. If you don’t have an OCLS library card, just leave it blank. Please be aware that the library does not record …
Save Your Manuscripts!
This is such basic advice I thought it would go without saying. But at least half a dozen times in less than a year, I’ve encountered writers who no longer had a word processor document containing the manuscript for their book. These are all folks who had their book published …
Online Writing Classes May–July 2025
The Orange County Library System here in Central Florida holds writing workshops over Zoom, so anyone anywhere may attend. The Library Card field on the registration form is optional. If you don’t have an OCLS library card, just leave it blank. Please be aware that the library does not record …
Developmental vs Substantive Editing—What’s the Difference?
Q: What is the difference between developmental editing and substantive editing? A: That depends on whom you ask. Seriously, even editors can’t agree amongst ourselves what’s what, which is why each of us has some kind of web page where we define different types of editing in our own terms. …
Edit Your Novel Like a Pro Update
When I launched the Edit Your Novel Like a Pro online course in January, I never thought it would take a year to complete. But that is fibromyalgia kicking my tail once again. The course is complete now, and contains about seven and a half hours of teaching—an hour and …
Coming Soon: Books and Courses
You all know that I’ve had several projects back-burnered for a while now, including the second and third books in the Prophet’s Chronicle series and my online editing course for writers, Edit Your Novel Like a Pro. After leaving these idling for ages while I went about the business of, …
When to Use Commas Between Adjectives
This question comes up often in my editing: should or shouldn’t there be commas between adjectives in a string? I hate to tell you this but … it depends. Yeah, I know, English is complicated. That’s why I’m here. I swear, we don’t make up these rules just to keep …
Create Fictional Languages Without ConLangs
Constructed Languages like Elvish and Klingon are a vital part of much speculative fiction. But you needn’t be a linguist like Tolkein or Okrand to incorporate distinct fictional languages into your storyworld. You can use what we know about real-world languages to give the impression your characters are speaking different …
How to Go Deeper into Characters’ Emotions
One of the most frequent comments editors make on new writers’ manuscripts is to go deeper into characters’ emotions. Readers come to narrative stories for an emotional experience. So authors, both of fiction and of narrative nonfiction, need to go beyond telling the reader how a character feels. The goal …