Years ago, “Have ninjas jump in through the window!” was the go-to suggestion for one of my then-crit-group members whenever a story’s pace slowed down, the writer was stuck, the characters were dithering about what to do next, the writer was dithering over which of six things
Read more →“It’s so hard to actually disregard advice that doesn’t work for you. The minute you start thinking about it, it’s ingrained in your head.” –Rose I decided I wanted to give a more detailed response to this than I gave in the comments two weeks ago, because
Read more →“Intuition” is generally defined as the ability to know or understand something by instinct, without conscious reasoning or analysis. It’s an important piece of the writing process for the vast majority of writers, no matter how analytical they normally are. How important, and in what way, depends
Read more →For several decades now, I have been a staunch supporter of the notion that “good writing” is subjective, and therefore not a terribly useful standard for people who want to become writers. Looking at my recent posts, it’s been a while since I talked about this directly
Read more →It’s another open mike, which is a good thing because my brain is frozen and it’ll be another week before the weather really starts warming up. I’m okay so far (and if you don’t know why I’m mentioning that, you haven’t been reading/watching news out of Minneapolis,
Read more →A few years back, I was discussing the importance of viewpoint choice with a young writer. We appeared to be in complete agreement on the subject, right up to the point where he commented that changing the viewpoint of “Snow White” to one of the dwarfs made
Read more →Characterization comes in two parts—physical and personality, or, if you prefer, external and internal. This complicates all the basic telling/showing decisions, which are complicated even more by what the story’s viewpoint is. Let’s start with the physical/external, because it’s a lot like the description of places I
Read more →Today I want to talk about the “show” part of “show, don’t tell.” Because it isn’t quite as simple as it looks. (And that is why it took me the whole post to just talk about showing in terms of describing a setting, meaning I’m going to
Read more →Probably the most common piece of technical advice about writing fiction is “show, don’t tell.” I’ve gone on at length in other posts about what’s wrong with this dictum, but today I want to talk about how to do it right. Starting with some technical aspects. First,
Read more →I’m posting this on New Year’s Eve, when everybody celebrates having made it through the last year and looks with hope toward the blank slate that arrives tomorrow. Of course, for most of us, it isn’t really a totally blank slate. I have several projects in various
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