When I was a kid developing my obsession with The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins, I spent a lot of time coming up with my own ideas for the series. I would sketch out the covers, create the titles, and even write the back cover copy. I had no idea what I was doing back then had a name: fan fiction. And I definitely didn’t realize it was helping me grow as a writer.

For the uninitiated, fan fiction is any writing someone does that uses another writer’s characters and setting. And while fanfic as a concept isn’t new, the early-aughts saw the rise of online spaces like...

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Photo by Erico Marcelino on Unsplash

Starting this week, we're participating in a fun and unusual project on...

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Successful authors are those with clear, distinguishable voices. Jane Austen’s work is marked by an amused fondness for the British landed gentry, while Stephen King’s iconic characters and tone are easily identifiable and relatable. But it requires another skill set entirely to capture another person's voice—a skill set some famous authors with their own distinct voices mastered. You may be surprised to learn that these famous authors dabbled as ghostwriters before their careers were established.

1. Sinclair Lewis

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930,...

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Those of us who read and write regularly know that we're the better for having engaged with our favorite stories. But are the benefits of reading fiction more concrete than that? Research suggests that they are, according to a recent overview of several studies on the subject that was published on the BBC's website, along with several other studies in the past. After a bit more research into the subject, we determined that the benefits of reading fiction are not only mental, but physical as...

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