Last week, I talked about the three most common reasons for a writer getting stuck: first, that it’s actually part of their normal process, second, the fear of some stretchy or tricky bit that comes next, and third, that they’ve actually made a mistake and their backbrain
Read more →First, thanks for all the well-wishes. I really appreciate them. I’m not quite back to full power just yet, but much better, hence this delayed but still present blog post. “Writer’s block” is a term that gets used for everything from the pathological inability to produce a
Read more →Your regular blog post will resume next week, when I have gotten over this cold/flu thing and can breathe again.
Read more →One of my writer-friends, back when she had several toddlers and a day job to fit writing around, used to say that no one else will defend your time for you. You have to do it yourself. Which means you have to make writing one of your
Read more →The hero’s journey If you’ve read much how-to-write advice in the past forty years, you’ve probably seen much talk of “The Hero’s Journey,” which is supposed to be the fundamental template or structure that lies underneath all great stories. It’s generally attributed to Joseph Campbell…but really,
Read more →Last week, I kept stumbling across stories about the different responses people have to feedback. The first couple came in the form of two versions of the old story about the violin maestro. He was approached by a young student who wanted the maestro’s judgement on his
Read more →Ursula le Guin was one of the greats of the SF/F field. It hurts to have to write that sentence in the past tense, even though 88 years is a good run by anyone’s standards. I’ve been reading le Guin’s work since I was thirteen and Rocannon’s
Read more →Everyone I know wants to do good work. Very few will admit to wanting their work to be perfect, either because they’ve had “nothing’s perfect” drummed into them, because they don’t want to appear to be saying that they are so good they can write perfect fiction
Read more →Writers use a variety of different metaphors to describe how they think about plot and structure. One that I’ve seen used quite a bit is “beads on a string” – that is, figuring out a plot is a process of lining up a series of beads/scenes in
Read more →It’s a new year, and for the last week or so, people have been talking about New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists. “Write a book” seems to turn up with enormous frequency on lists like “The Top Fifty New Year’s Resolutions of 2015/16/17/18” and “100 Things You
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