Dialog is the little black dress of fiction. Almost every story includes some, and it’s not uncommon to find dialog occupying a large chunk of important scenes. Sometimes the entire scene, or even the whole story, is done in dialog (and I’m not counting plays or screenwriting).
Read more →Back in July, I talked about Messing Around With Post-Its when I was three chapter into the novel, and came up with a plan for the next two or three chapters. This is an update on how that worked, and why. As a refresher, I had arranged
Read more →I’ve been thinking a lot about process lately, which is common when I’m in the middle of a book. It’s especially understandable this time, because this book isn’t working the way my process usually goes. Normally, I’m very much a linear writer. I start with Chapter One
Read more →The term “action,” like many terms in writing, covers a lot of ground. Some is obvious: a chase scene is action; so is a boxing match, a brawl, a battle, a gunfight. The scene where one guy is clinging to the railroad trestle and the other guy
Read more →“How do you manage your subplots?” somebody asked me a while back. “How do you decide when and where to put in a subplot scene, and how long to wait between them?” Apparently, her novel had about eight different subplots, and she was worried about going two
Read more →The other day, I was talking books with a non-writer acquaintance who eventually got around to the perennial complaint about how Mr. Long-Time Professional Writer’s work has gone horribly downhill, paired with a certain amount of bewilderment as to how an experienced professional could ever make so
Read more →As with all updates, this one hasn’t gone as smoothly as I’d have liked. We know (and are attempting to fix) the problem with the site not allowing comments and the “404” error when you click the “Home” button. If people find any other errors or problems,
Read more →One of the things I remember from my high school physics class is Newton’s First Law of Motion, also called the law of inertia: “An object in motion tends to remain in motion; an object at rest tends to remain at rest.” It applies to a lot
Read more →A lot of attention gets paid to “writing a killer hook” for one’s story, to the point where I’ve known people to spend more time writing their very first sentence than they spend working on the whole rest of their story. Not all at once, of course.
Read more →This is just to let everyone know that sometime in the next day or two we are rolling over to the new site format, which is not that different from the current one but which will (we hope) be more mobile-friendly. I’m hoping that there won’t be
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