“Ask Jane” Shorts

Every writer knows the feeling. You're stuck on the scene in front of you, and meanwhile a later scene is running so clearly in your head you could write it...

How do you describe a setting your readers will return to over and over—the church, the cottage, the antiques shop—without giving away every detail on their...

Reveal character through description and you turn ordinary scene-setting into one of the most efficient tools in fiction. There's a technique I've used in the...

How much description belongs in historical fiction—the environment, the clothing, the food, the textures of another era? There's no fixed rule, and I think...

Memoir writing raises a question most writing guides don't answer: what do you put on the page when your memories conflict with someone else's? I wrote...

Describing your protagonist's appearance in first-person POV is trickier than it looks—your narrator can't just announce her own features. There's a technique...

Writing food in fiction depends on your genre—and getting it right can make the difference between an immersive reader experience and a scene that bogs down...

Can you use brand names in your fiction writing? It's an important question, and the answer is more nuanced than you might think. In this quick Ask Jane...

How much technical detail should your protagonist's skills get in your story? In this quick writing lesson, I break down how genre and reader expectations...