Zainah Yousef

World building involves many facets and designing different aspects of the world is honestly a great experience when it comes to writing speculative fiction. Creating cultures, languages, and even religions is a lot of fun and although it can seem intimidating, there are many things that can help make it more manageable. When it comes

A book blurb is a great way to market your story to potential readers. You’ll often find this being written as the summary on the back of the book or available as a description on an author’s website. You can actually see this in action on this page of my website where I talk about

There are many archetypes for characters that exist out there, and there are also many types of moral systems that some characters have that differentiate them from the traditional ideas of morality. There are certainly characters that are morally gray, complex, and memorable for doing things in ways that are often considered unconventional or possibly

Characterization is one of the most important components of the storytelling process and developing complex, memorable, and interesting characters is an important facet of the writing process. There are many ways to describe characters as well, but you may have heard about the idea of a round character and a flat character. Stories often make

Psychological thrillers rely on crafting a thriller around the human psyche, exploring complex themes and blurring the lines between the concepts of sanity and insanity. Although psychological thrillers follow the same ideas as regular thrillers with suspense, an action-packed plot, and constant mixed signals to keep the audience strung along, there are still things that

The unreliable narrator is a tool that many writers use in stories to add more depth and mystery behind a plot. The narrative technique revolves around a narrator who delivers readers the story from their own perspective, but the narrator is compromised, may not have the full picture, or may have a distorted view of

Most books are written in the format of chapters, where each chapter follows a piece of a stream of events. Chapters makes it significantly easier to digest a story, and it also gives you room to break when the scene is not necessary to keep writing. The passage of time is also typically done through

One of the most popular story structures has to be the hero’s journey, otherwise known as the  monomyth. The hero’s journey has been used for centuries to structure many stories, and you’ll probably be able to recognize it after learning about the template behind it. The template was developed by Joseph Campbell and has been

With the recent popularity of romantasy, or romantic fantasy stories, and the popularity of booktok, there’s been a lot of talk about romance tropes that we all know and love and observe in many stories. Enemies to lovers has been one of the most popular romance tropes in literature, and many people really love the

As a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I always love to see books from both genres and even books that combine them. However, there is a big difference between science-fiction and fantasy, and both genres have their own characteristics that make them unique and stand alone. Although they are both part of the umbrella