For those of you just tuning in, I have two sisters who are professional artists. The one who does theater scenery and tromp l’oeil lives here in town, and when I moved into my new house some years back, she decided to paint my closets for me.
Read more →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
Read more →There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series: 1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch
Read more →I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which
Read more →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
Read more →I just (and I mean just, as in, haven’t unpacked the suitcase yet) got back from Chicago. The planned five-day trip turned into six (I should have known better than to schedule the meeting with the lawyer for the last day), but the estate tax return is
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