Context: Prologues

Context is important. It’s not the only thing that is important in a story, though, and sometimes it isn’t as important as writers think it is. Getting the context into the story is a perennial writing difficulty. There are two main solutions: working the context into the

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Room in your head

The holiday season is now officially in full swing. Around here, it starts slowly, a bit before Halloween, then ramps up gradually until just before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a steep climb full of preparations for either going somewhere to celebrate or hosting a celebration, and after

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Plots and Projects

A few years ago, I was talking to a businessperson at a family gathering, and I made a comment about my then-current work in process. He immediately assumed that my “project” (writing a book) would be “done” once the book was published and on the shelves for

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Outlines, Log lines, and so on

One of the most difficult things I have to do, as a novelist, is to come up with a short version of the book. This is, in large part, because I am a novelist—I have a hard time saying anything in less than 80,000 words—but that’s not

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Job list…

One of the things it’s easy to lose sight of is that “writing is a solitary business” has a lot of implications besides “it means you spend a lot of time sitting alone at your computer writing stuff.” Among other things, it means that everything comes down

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