What is “good”?

Exactly what constitutes “good writing” is a subjective judgment, and it can be extremely hard to separate from one’s personal taste – not the least because one is unlikely to read books one doesn’t like, and if one doesn’t read them, one can’t tell whether they’re “good writing”

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Questions from the mailbag

Why don’t you do a collection of Enchanted Forest short stories, like Book of Enchantments only all Enchanted Forest? Well, mainly because I’m a novelist. Short stories are really hard for me; in thirty years as a writer, I’ve written roughly fifteen publishable short stories. Ten of

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The escalation problem

The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven’t written a long-running series myself. The first thing is

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The skeleton in the closet

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

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What you get for free

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

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Quote unquote

Just for fun, I thought I’d put up some of my favorite quotations about writing, writers, and publishing. Feel free to chime in with yours! “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — W. Somerset Maugham “There are nine and

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