It’s open mike day! Suggest topics, ask questions, complain about your work, brag about your latest accomplishment, talk about what interests or excites you, make suggestions…whatever.
Read more →For many readers, one of the more effective ways of describing a scene is through the viewpoint character. The technique is a sub-category of “description as seasoning,” which I talked about last post, but it’s hard to describe in a brief paragraph. Hence this post. The first
Read more →Last post, I was talking mainly about description in general, and various changes in what’s been considered “good description” over time. This time, I’m going to go for talking about current considerations for description itself, and things that affect what works and what doesn’t. Like most things
Read more →Writing, like everything else human beings do, has fads and fashions that shift and change over time. One of the most obvious has to do with how description is handled in fiction. A lot of really early works don’t spend a lot of time describing mead-halls, hostelries,
Read more →Some years back, I had a writer friend who’d switched from being a journalist to writing fiction. She told me once that for her, the hardest part of writing fiction was learning not to automatically apply the basic journalism tenet: “Tell them what you’re gonna tell them,
Read more →A lot of things get referred to as “the tools of the writing trade.” When writers use that phrase, they’re usually talking about one of two things: either things to put words on paper or pixels (pen/pencil, paper, typewriter, computer, word processing/organizing programs, etc.), or else writing
Read more →It’s once again time for an open mike day! Talk about what you’re doing, continue discussion you started earlier, ask questions, complain… whatever.
Read more →I thought the nonsense about “weak verbs” in fiction died some time during the pandemic. Apparently, I was wrong; somebody helpfully forwarded a list of “weak verbs you should never use in your writing” recently. Which inspired this post. The first problem with talking about “weak verbs”
Read more →Probably the third or fourth thing I get asked by would-be writers—after “Where do you get your ideas?”, “Are you working on the next book? When will it be finished?”, and “I have this great idea; how about you write it and we split the money?”—is “How
Read more →The character-driven story currently seems to be most people’s Platonic Ideal for fiction, especially when compared to the plot-driven story…and those are the only two options most writing advice and/or classes present to writers. It’s taken for granted that one of these things–characterization or plot–must inevitably take
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