Possibly the most important scene at or near the end of any story is the climax. The first difficulty here is, exactly what is “the climax” when there are several possible types and a double handful of plotlines and subplots that all need to be wrapped up?
Read more →Climax: any moment of great intensity in a literary work. –Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Everybody knows what the climax of the story is, right? It’s the battle with the monster, the discovery of the cure for the plague, the revelation of the murderer, blowing
Read more →A while back, I got a deceptively simple question with an apparently obvious answer, all of which turn out to be neither so simple nor so obvious as they at first seemed. The question was, in essence, “What parts of your writing career can you talk about
Read more →The other day, I was looking over two different multi-book series, each of which is easily pushing a million words. Both are quite popular in their respective genres, but they are very different in their approach. Yet it could be argued that both writers make similar mistakes.
Read more →One of the questions I get a lot, especially when a class of students has been asked to come up with three questions each, is “Which one of your books is the best?” It’s not quite up there with “Where do you get your ideas?” but it’s
Read more →Last Friday, Minnesota Public Radio reran a series of round-table shows in which they asked groups of people from various professions – teacher, musician, entrepreneur, doctor – what six things they wish they had known when they were starting out in their profession. Most of the answers
Read more →Connectivity issues mean the next post will be Sunday, May 11. Apologies, The Webmaster
Read more →Everybody has too much to do, always. You can tell, because half the time, the first thing people ask a writer is “When do you find time to write?” (the other half the time, the first thing is “Where do you get your ideas?” and the second
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