January 30, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the [...]
January 27, 2010 – 3:35 pm
Another thing that it is really important to pay attention to in first-person writing is what that character knows. Not what he/she knows about the plot; that should be obvious. About everything else.
When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans [...]
January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm
As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.
First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. [...]
January 21, 2010 – 4:42 pm
When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe [...]
January 18, 2010 – 8:13 am
How do you decide where a story starts?
Stories, short or long, generally are not about characters who are happily living their normal lives. Something unusual is going on; something has upset the status quo (whether the status quo was a miserable life as a slave, or a happy life as a king).
Stories therefore generally start [...]
January 15, 2010 – 9:06 am
One of the problems with talking about writing is that the terminology isn’t standardized. Even when everybody agrees what something is called, the same word gets used to mean other things, which can lead to confusion.
Take the term “viewpoint.” It can mean either the person through whose eyes the story is told, as in “Who [...]
January 12, 2010 – 11:29 am
If people would ask writers where they get their titles, instead of where they get their ideas, they’d probably get a lot more interesting answers much of the time.
In my experience, it’s really difficult for most writers to articulate exactly where they got the idea for something (except in those few cases where it’s blindingly [...]
January 9, 2010 – 12:15 pm
It’s been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks.
It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of cookbooks [...]
January 3, 2010 – 3:45 pm
It being the new year - and the first year of a new decade - I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people’s New Year’s Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that “write a book” is, in some form or another, on an awful lot of people’s lists (it [...]