Every beginning is the end of something, and every ending is the start of something new. It follows that every beginning holds the seeds of its own eventual end. Those new shoots in the vegetable garden are the end of the seeds I planted two weeks ago,
Read more →Folk tales and fairy stories have been around for as long as people have. Specific details don’t always stay the same—there are over 300 versions of the story we mostly know as “Cinderella.” Some use a ring as identification, rather than a shoe; in others she attends
Read more →Everyone agrees that writer’s block has something to do with not writing, but exactly what counts as writer’s block varies wildly. Some think writer’s block is anything at all that results in not-writing (including having a hangover or deciding they’d rather go to the beach today than
Read more →“Writing forsoothly” is a term that has floated around the publishing industry for decades, resurfacing every time a novel that uses elevated or pseudo-historical language becomes popular, and a zillion people decide to imitate it. It’s easiest to see in dialog, when the author clearly has no
Read more →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 →
