Zainah Yousef

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

Horror is one of the most popular genres in movies, gaming, and books out there. We have a whole month pretty much dedicated to all things spooky and scary and horror movies are always releasing around Halloween. In general, horror media is a big deal in society, and horror has a strong foothold. Horror novels

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

Fantasy is a large umbrella term that encapsulates several different forms of fantasy, such as grimdark, light fantasy, high fantasy, epic fantasy, and more. I’ve actually discussed what grimdark fantasy is and what high fantasy is compared to low fantasy, and there are some interesting things that differentiate each subgenre. For today’s post, I’ll be

Many books out there are written from a single perspective of a single character, however there are also many stories that explore several other perspectives. This can be done in first or third person POV, which I’ve talked about the difference before on my channel. Providing perspectives of different characters is something that can help

One of the most popular age ranges for books has to be the young adult (YA) range. YA has been growing for quite some time and some of the biggest and best-selling books to come out recently have been written for young adult audiences. Although I’m well past the YA range at this point, I

Foreshadowing is one of the most important tools used by writers in literature to try and create a level of suspense and intrigue in their stories. The idea of foreshadowing is to give hints about things that are to come in the story, building expectations and setting things up. When done properly, it is often