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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →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,
Read more →I flew down to Alabama for the Big Family Christmas this year. That meant I also flew back the day after Christmas. Which was also the day after some idiot tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. My sister and I were lucky — the new
Read more →As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to “redecorate” the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets
Read more →When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options. Take the
Read more →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 particular mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten convinced (usually because some
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