Advance planning

There are a lot of bits of advice floating around for would-be, wannabe, and newbie fiction writers who are having problems getting started. There are currently a plethora of how-to-write books advocating serious advance planning, ranging from detailed outlining systems, to starting with different sets of character

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The Two Basic Rules

I’ve been saying for a long time that there are only two rules for writing: 1) You must write, and 2) What you write has to work. And I keep running into writers at opposite ends of the spectrum who really, really, reeeeeeaaaally don’t like that. The

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Ending? What Ending?

Endings are a problem for a lot of writers on a lot of levels. People have trouble making them convincing, trouble making them dramatic, trouble keeping them from dragging out or being too abrupt. One of the problems that seems surprisingly common is picking out the ending

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What I have been up to

I am back, after eight days in Beijing and Shanghai, plus two on the plane, plus another four in San Francisco on the way there (because my sister wasn’t going to San Francisco without eating at Fisherman’s Wharf and it sort of spiraled from there). I still

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Getting good critique

That last post of comments segues nicely into this one, which is about critiquing and being critiqued. Good critique is hard to find. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that “good critique” means different things to different people. Some folks want the proverbial

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