These days, a career in writing has innumerable options. Even if you limit yourself to fiction, there’s screenwriting, playwriting, comics and graphic novels, short fiction, novels, and that’s all before you even get to the Internet and ebook side of things. And it’s not just a matter of deciding for yourself
Read more →There are several reasons why, for the last two posts, I have been using terms like “planning” and “pre-writing” and “notes” more often than “outline.” The main one is that the outline that the writer sends to an editor as part of a proposal is a very
Read more →OK, since there seems to be yet more interest in plot planning and prewriting and how to do it, you get still more posts on the subject. This one is on alternate ways of doing plot-related planning; next one will be on the kind of outline you
Read more →So if you are going to do some pre-planning before you start writing your book, where do you begin and how do you do it? As usual, it depends on the writer and the story, but here are a few things to consider: First, why are you
Read more →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
Read more →Spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax. For a lot of would-be writers, they seem to be love ‘em or leave ‘em – which is to say, many of the folks I talk to have either an absolute slavish devotion to formal grammar, punctuation, or else a firm conviction that
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →Some years back, I read a book on the history of the penal system – one of those random research things that pays off in unexpected ways. In this case, what struck me was the author’s summary of the history and theory behind law and punishment. A
Read more →So LizV wants to know how to find critiquers in the first place, rightly noting that the last post I did has more to do with how you deal with them once you have them lined up. The short answer is, you ask people. The longer answer…
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