The process of revising effectively tends to vary from writer to writer just as the first-draft writing process varies, and it’s not necessarily connected to the way one writes your first drafts. In fact, often (though not always) the revisions process seems to need to be the opposite of the writer’s writing process in some [...]
One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the [...]
So Minicon was last weekend, and in among seeing lots of friends (and managing to miss seeing far too many others) there was the usual crop of questions – what are you going to write next, where do you get your ideas, etc. Including one poor fellow who was convinced that he’d run out of [...]
January 18, 2012 – 6:26 am
Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times, not so much…and the problematic usages reinforce the [...]
January 11, 2012 – 6:48 am
Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer’s thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he’s trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting rant. My apologies in advance. This particular comment [...]
December 11, 2011 – 9:29 am
A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty): Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.” Me: “Sounds familiar.” Writer (despairing): [...]
November 20, 2011 – 6:56 am
Last post, Libby said: I’ve been having trouble with that point in a story from the lead-up to the climax to the aftermath… once I hit the part where all the stuff I’ve been alluding to has to APPEAR, things tend to go over too smoothly and much too quickly, and I think it’s ultimately [...]
November 6, 2011 – 6:50 am
There’s another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. And that’s the folks who think that if there is any resemblance whatsoever between what they want to write and any recent bestseller, they must be selling out. Or that everyone will think they are selling out. Never mind that they’ve adored vampire [...]
November 2, 2011 – 6:37 am
For the last several weeks, I’ve been running from one convention/appearance/trade show to another, and it seems that at every one of them I’ve run into at least one would-be writer who is worried about “selling out.” More accurately, they’ve been worried about having to sell out in order to get published. These folks look at [...]
October 9, 2011 – 6:18 am
Back in the day, on Usenet, I had a little lecture that I posted periodically, whenever too many folks seemed to be bemoaning the horribleness of the submission process so much that they were losing sight of the actual job of submitting. (Make no mistake; the submission process is horrible and lengthy and depressing, but [...]
October 5, 2011 – 6:58 am
The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think. Let me unpack that a little. It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster [...]
October 2, 2011 – 6:17 am
The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing various bad-plotting mistakes made in various TV series, specifically the sort that used to be called “hack writer’s gambit.” I say “used to be called” because a quick series of googles found very little in the way of modern references for the term. So I’m [...]
September 18, 2011 – 6:15 am
How did you know that you wanted to be a writer? I didn’t. I never, ever wanted to “be a writer.” I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about them. [...]
September 11, 2011 – 6:25 am
I’ve talked before about the opening of a story and some of the things that can go wrong with the all-drama, all-action, all-the-time “hook.” But it occurs to me that I haven’t talked much about what a hook is, or how to do it right. Hence today’s post. Openings are important; nobody denies that. In my [...]
August 31, 2011 – 6:14 am
Another one of the truisms about writing that you hear a lot is “the power of the telling detail.” And it’s quite true; a single specific detail at exactly the right time can do more to evoke a world or a mood than pages of description, even if we’re talking about really well-written description. In [...]
August 28, 2011 – 6:14 am
One of the things that professors of literature have been doing ever since they were invented is trying to analyze literature of all kinds. And one of the chief ways of analyzing something is to break it down into small pieces, label them, and then look for the patterns in how they fit together. Breaking [...]
August 24, 2011 – 6:30 am
Narrative summary is possibly the most flexible of the various ways of presenting a story. Narrative summary doesn’t necessarily tie the author down to chronological order, the way dialog and dramatization do, nor does it require a focus on one particular aspect of the story, as description often does. This makes narrative summary at once [...]
August 10, 2011 – 6:43 am
scene: in a drama, a subdivision of an act or of a play not divided into acts….”scene” is also the name given to a “dramatic” method of narration that presents events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are supposed to be occurring, i.e., usually in detail and with substantial use of [...]
Recently, a fan came up to me, enthusiastically waving Thirteenth Child. “This book blew me away!” he said. “It breaks all the rules! How did you do that?” Naturally, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “What rules?” What most would-be-writers mean when they’re talking about “breaking the rules” are the absolute pronouncements about [...]
One of the supposed truisms of writing is that a good plot must have conflict. And while this is, in fact, true, I’ve seen it misinterpreted so many times that I thought I’d talk about it a little. The problem always seems to come in the definition of “conflict.” We hear that word so often [...]
Alfred Hitchcock gave a famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense. It boils down to this: If a bunch of guys are playing poker and suddenly a bomb goes off under the table, that’s a surprise. It’s not what the viewer expects. If, however, the viewer knows the bomb is there from the [...]
There are four really, really important things to remember about characters: Characters are people. (Yes, even if they’re aliens or elves or talking rabbits.) People, and therefore characters, are all the same. People, and therefore characters, are all different. Most important of all: Every person, and therefore every character, is an individual. Taking these assertions [...]
I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three – plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as the three things one can do in a [...]
When would-be writers ask “where do you get your ideas?” they are often asking the wrong question. They’re struggling to get started on a story, but they’re not actually starting from scratch. They have an idea. It’s just not enough to go on with yet. So what these folks really want and need to know isn’t [...]
“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who’s more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer [...]
Back in high school, I read a lot of mystery novels, many of which were police procedurals, and I got the basic triumvirate for figuring out who was the killer pounded into my brain: Means, motive, and opportunity. They actually apply to any villain undertaking any dastardly deed: the villain always needs a way to [...]
Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I’ll take what I can get.) She was listing [...]
There are two basic approaches to combining or developing ideas and story: in-depth development, and the kitchen sink approach. These are opposite ends of a continuum, of course; there are very few writers who work strictly one way or the other. Still, it’s useful to think about the extremes before one starts thinking about how [...]
“There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition… “But not much!” – The Flying Karamozov Brothers There are some basic things about writing that people who’ve done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one [...]
My walking partner and I were talking the other day about the sorts of assumptions people make about books, and she said something that made me pause to think. I can’t give you the exact phrasing, but the basic sense of it was that literary and mainstream fiction is, as a general rule, a lot [...]
April 15 is coming up fast, and for anyone who made money writing, it tends to be rather traumatic. No matter how much you set aside from your payments, it never seems to be enough (for those of us in the U.S., that 15% Social Security payment is a perennial killer). And of course they [...]
Nearly every piece of fiction has one main character and one central problem. Even when the story is told from multiple viewpoints with an ensemble cast, each of whom has a different important plotline, there is almost always one plot problem that is the problem that the reader wants to see solved, and one character [...]
”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” – Lewis Carroll One of the things I didn’t understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was [...]
February 16, 2011 – 6:30 am
“I don’t CARE what happens to these people.” – Dorothy J. Heydt Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they’re about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of fast-paced action, brilliant worldbuilding, intricate plots – all [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:09 am
“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to [...]
December 26, 2010 – 10:34 am
Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short. And now that we have that [...]
December 19, 2010 – 6:14 am
Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer’s success and/or fame and that writer’s ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once an author has published or won some awards, [...]
December 12, 2010 – 6:27 am
It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a “hook” – something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what “hooks” one reader will annoy or repel another, and this is seldom acknowledged by [...]
December 8, 2010 – 9:03 am
Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I’m now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they’re useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren’t as developed as the rest of the writer’s tool set. [...]
December 5, 2010 – 5:19 pm
Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see how to guide stuff through the feed. I [...]
December 1, 2010 – 6:08 am
Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Algis Budrys wrote an excellent series of columns for LOCUS magazine on what he called “cinematic prose,” using his Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon as an example. Alas, my copies have long since vanished into wherever things go when one has moved house multiple times over that many [...]
November 28, 2010 – 12:24 pm
I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call “sloppy omniscient viewpoint.” Most of the time, a given scene would have a “viewpoint character,” but whenever I thought someone else’s thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character’s head for a few lines. I also backed off every [...]
November 24, 2010 – 6:30 am
As I’ve said before, the terms “viewpoint” and “point of view” can mean two different things: either the viewpoint character or the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person). I’m using it in the second sense today. Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most commonly used viewpoint in fiction. There are [...]
November 10, 2010 – 6:07 am
When I was writing my first novel, I didn’t know any other writers (well, except for my mother). I’d also never read a how-to-write book. Consequently, there were a lot of things that I did without knowing there was a name for them; as far as I was concerned, they were just things I’d seen [...]
September 22, 2010 – 8:29 am
I have several friends (some professional writers, some not) who consider themselves conflict-averse. Faced with the near-universal insistence on conflict as the primary factor in plotting, they either hunch down, grumbling, and attempt to provide enough murders, fights, and battles to fill this presumed need, or they throw up their hands in despair and produce [...]
September 15, 2010 – 10:18 am
Starting a completely new story is exciting. There aren’t any constraints to worry about: no dangling plot threads that you have to tie up, no previously established background that you have to stay consistent with, no inconvenient mysteries or revelations that you’re stuck with. It’s a clean slate, full of fresh new possibilities. At least, it [...]
September 12, 2010 – 6:48 am
Back in 1947, in an essay titled “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (since reprinted several times), Robert Heinlein wrote five rules for people who want to become professional writers. They’ve been republished many times, and for the most part, they’re still good (I’ll get to that “most part” in a minute). The rules are: [...]
August 29, 2010 – 10:12 am
Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems [...]
August 25, 2010 – 10:56 am
Probably the most often-asked question writers get is “Where do you get your ideas?” Very few people ever ask “What do you do with your ideas once you have them?” though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don’t realize that there is a lot of [...]
August 22, 2010 – 3:58 pm
“I don’t have time to write” is one of the most common writers’ complaints, both from people who haven’t published yet and from seasoned pros. The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is “There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me [...]
Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum – maybe just hair and eye color – and [...]
These days, when people talk about a “Cinderella Story,” they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it’s a Cinderella sports team that’s just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling’s welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what people seem to be interested in is the [...]
Nearly every writer has what I call a “default setting” for many or most of the basic pieces of writing. They tend to automatically write in first person, or third, or multiple viewpoint. When they’re thinking up stories or developing ideas, they gravitate toward the action/adventure plot, or toward one focusing on relationships, or toward [...]
Most people just read books. That is, they absorb the information, or enjoy the plot and characters, without thinking too much about how and why they work. It’s a lot like watching a play, or a magic show. It’s supposed to be relaxing, so sit back and enjoy. Reading like a writer is more like [...]
A bit ago, I got asked to do my standard rant on this. I put it off ’til the book was done, but it’s done now. So here’s the short form: Read a story. Does it work? Yes? Then it’s good. The problem with the term “good writing” is that it assumes there is an [...]
Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]
So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes. One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right? People who think [...]
April 29, 2010 – 12:50 pm
I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning. What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is [...]
April 27, 2010 – 10:57 am
So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level. Action can be “seen” by the reader from lots of [...]
Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they’re pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I’ve said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that’s full of how-to-write books – five shelves of them – and couldn’t find [...]
Writing is difficult to talk about. I mean the real thing, the stuff that happens when you are sitting there with your paper and pen or your computer or your stone tablets and chisel and telling a story. We talk about bits and pieces of writing all the time. We separate out plot, characterization, setting, [...]
March 12, 2010 – 10:23 am
As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do: the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind. The first and possibly most important thing to know about [...]
“Outline – 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” – Oxford American Dictionary If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. [...]
February 24, 2010 – 9:39 am
Real-life incidents aren’t all that useful in fiction, in my experience, because real life just sort of happens. Basing a piece of fiction too closely on real-life events and experiences all too often results in stories that don’t work, and which the author justifies by saying “But it really happened that way!” “It really happened” [...]
February 8, 2010 – 10:38 am
What makes an ending “The End”? In a word: closure. At the end of the story, whether the heroine won or lost, she’s not going to get another chance to try. The Evil Overlord is gone for good, the wedding is on (or off), the murderer has been discovered and arrested. There may be some [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
December 11, 2009 – 12:17 pm
I keep running across people who think that there is One Right Way to write a story, and who tie themselves in knots trying to force themselves to write “the right way” when it doesn’t suit their particurlar mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten convinced (usually because some authority figure like an editor or highly respected [...]
December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm
A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it. “Run!” Jeff cried. (“Jeff cried” is the speech tag.) Jane said, “I can’t.” (“Jane said” is [...]
November 19, 2009 – 11:25 am
Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued, and misunderstood job…which is most especially misunderstood by [...]
November 14, 2009 – 11:59 am
Some people are afraid to exercise their talents, or afraid that if they try, they will fail and have to face just how little talent they have. But far more are just simply not interested enough. Writing a book sounds like a nice thing to do – the way learning to ski sounds nice, or [...]
November 2, 2009 – 8:21 am
There’s a range of writing types, from people who hate revising and who want to write it down and be done with it, to people who can’t let go of anything and who keep changing it. The trick is to find a balance point that works for you. Nothing is ever perfect the first time [...]
October 31, 2009 – 8:38 am
“How could you write about anything without wondering if it was true? I mean, you’d be describing a bird in a garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” (Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, Harpers, 1965) One of the things my mother never [...]
October 18, 2009 – 6:08 pm
Once you “have an idea,” the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story. How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting [...]
October 16, 2009 – 12:32 pm
The single most common question people ask writers – especially SF/F writers – is “Where do you get your ideas?” The assumption always seems to be that ideas are hard to come by. But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard. For instance, anyone can sit down and come up with a grocery [...]
October 13, 2009 – 6:17 pm
For some reason, I keep running into writers – mostly those who aren’t yet published, but sometimes ones who are – who seem to have gotten the impression that there is some sort of checklist that editors work through before they’ll buy a book. I ran into one recently who had a whole list of [...]
September 21, 2009 – 8:21 am
Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendence. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead for all [...]
September 2, 2009 – 10:13 am
There are a couple of ways of looking at plot, ranging from the bird’s-eye view at a macro level to the order of scenes, and events and incidents within scenes. The one most people run across first – and one of the most useful ways of looking at it for many writers – is the [...]
August 30, 2009 – 11:11 am
In the comments on the last post, S.A. Cox said “Historically, however, with both writing and teaching, one of the main keys to my development has been trusting my instincts about what is working and what isn’t, and then working like a dog at what isn’t.” My experience with trusting my instincts has been good; [...]
August 28, 2009 – 11:23 am
Every writer has something – some part of writing, however tiny – that comes easily (or at least, more easily than the rest of it). For some it’s action scenes; for others, it’s deep characterization; for others it’s plot or dialog or structure or theme. But there’s always something. What this means is that, for [...]
August 11, 2009 – 1:04 pm
I probably should have posted this first, if I was going to blog about getting stuck. Because one of the more important things a writer needs to do when they’re stuck, before trying to apply any of the techniques I was talking about, is to figure out why they are stuck. Diagnosis is important, because [...]
I’ve been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer’s block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, “How do you know what happens next?” Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because “What happens next?” and “What do I do next?” are among the most [...]
August 2, 2009 – 10:32 am
One of the things you see a lot in fantasy stories is a villain who is purely and simply evil and knows it. No rationalizations, no semi-plausible rationales, not even a rotten childhood to blame it on, just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over The World Because He Is Really, Really Evil. There are ways of [...]
One of the plagues of beginning writers is the feeling that they are doing something “wrong.” Not wrong in the sense of technique – messing up viewpoint, for instance – but that they have made, are making, or will make, a wrong decision about “what happens next.” They are haunted by the fear that it [...]
Description is one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Some readers want more, more, more; they want to see every button and bead on the dress, every scratch on the woodwork. Other people roll their eyes and complain about slowing down the story when they run across long passages of descriptive infodump. Still others want to have [...]
One of the perennial questions I get from people, especially those who want to be writers, is “how do you come up with the names?”-meaning, usually, the “weird fantasy names” in settings that bear no resemblance to the “real world,” rather than the more ordinary names like James and Cecelia I use in other books. [...]
The “different panel” at 4th Street this year was on pacing and structure. I’ve been pondering it since then, and this is what I think (or part of it, anyway): Pacing is how fast it feels like things happen. Not how fast they actually do happen; what it feels like to the reader-this is why sometimes the cure [...]
Last weekend, at 4th Street Fantasycon, somebody asked me for a post that I did years back on Usenet, on the difference between the way short story writers and novelists might develop the same basic story idea. Here it is: Basically, short stories require a tight focus and a single, central plot thread; in a [...]
I have just finished arguing with a would-be writer who a) is convinced that passive voice is evil and must be avoided at all times, and b) has, it turns out, no idea at all what passive voice actually is. I am therefore going to rant. Passive voice is not when something has been allowed [...]
One of the things you find a lot in writing books are prescriptions: This is THE (only right and workable best) way to write/develop a career as a writer. And they’re wrong. Or so I think, anyway. There is no One True Way to write. (This is practically my motto, and has been for years.) [...]
A good many years ago, I was on a panel about the business side of writing. About half the panel were full-time writers; the other half still had day jobs. During the question-and-answer session, someone directed a question at James P. Hogan, one of the other full-timers on the panel:, something along the lines of [...]
Write. No, really, that’s it. It’s kind of a definitional thing. What you have to be in order to be a writer is, you have to be someone who writes. Period. You don’t have to be nice; you don’t have to be educated; you don’t have to follow a bunch of rules; you don’t even [...]