It has recently occurred to me that the real problem with writing a novel—or with giving advice about writing a novel—is that writing a novel is a lot like inventing cold fusion. No one in the world has ever invented cold fusion. People have invented a lot
Read more →Wow, people in comments have already covered a lot of what I was going to say about villains in this one. I still have a few things to add, though… Starting with: What kind of villain suits your story? If you’re writing The Lord of the Rings,
Read more →Look at any book or blog of fiction-writing advice, and you will most likely find a bunch of statements about the desirability of complex, well-rounded characters. Some give you twenty-page questionnaires to fill out in advance of writing, as if listing a character’s flaws and childhood traumas
Read more →Understanding how stories work improves one’s ability to put them together better. What many people don’t get is that “understanding” can be intuitive as well as—or instead of—analytical/intellectual. Both ways of understanding are subject to error. The “gut feel” that X is the right thing to do
Read more →One of the things I keep coming back to is the fact that writing, especially writing for a living, is a business. It doesn’t have to be—for instance, people who write fanfiction for free don’t have to worry about that part. But anyone who gets paid for
Read more →And it is time again for an Open Mic post, which is extraordinarily convenient as I have to work on the copy-edit for “The Dark Lord’s Daughter” this week! Have fun…
Read more →Back in high school, I took a semester of journalism. The teacher focused hard on the “5 W’s and an H”—Who, What, When, Where, Why and How—and also on the structure of a news story (most important stuff in the first paragraph, steady increase in interesting-but-less-important details
Read more →As I’ve said before, dialog isn’t a transcript of the way people talk. It’s a stripped-down model that takes out the majority of verbal pause-fillers that don’t add meaning most of the time, such as “um,” “er,” “you know,” “like,” “uh,” “well,” etc. The catch is that
Read more →I’ve been plot-noodling with a couple of primarily character-centered writers lately, and I’ve noticed that they both have a similar problem. Most of the time, they don’t even see the places where they are dropping plot-hints…and when they do see them, they don’t immediately recognize them. One
Read more →Edited to reformat for readability, per Deep Lurker’s suggestion. This is my version of how-I-develop-it-into-a-scene when I’m having particular trouble. In this case, I started with a conversation “sketch draft” with minimal movement. There are four characters present: Archie, the 15-year-old POV; Del, aged 10; and Harkawn
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