Generally speaking, pre-publication critical comments fall into two broad groups: reader reactions (“I started skimming right here.” “This whole section confused me.”) and specific suggestions (“Have ninjas leap through the window!” “I think you should cut the grandmother character.”) Both require some thought, but along different lines.
Read more →LizV said: Learning to judge what feedback to take on board and what to disregard may well be the hardest lesson a writer has to learn. I mostly do it by gut instinct, but sometimes it’s taken me six months to be able to articulate why a
Read more →Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of advice online for “creatives”. The trouble is, almost none of the advice takes into consideration the way “being creative” actually works. If you need to fix the broken hinge on the back screen door, it’s relatively easy to break the
Read more →At the beginning of a novel, anything can happen, and it’s easy to change things one doesn’t like. Your heroine starts off sitting on a rock by Cape Canaveral, longingly watching the rockets take off, and three paragraphs in it suddenly occurs to you that she’s a
Read more →Katherine asked: Could you please share your thoughts on shaping a good story / balancing the form, particularly across a series? If you are setting out to commit a series on purpose, with malice aforethought, the first few things you need to think about are: 1) Do
Read more →“Aiming for perfection is what causes people to stay stuck.” –Alice Boyes My brother recently took a class in gem-cutting. When he finished, he told me that a “perfect” cut is a matter of magnification. What looks perfect to the naked eye is a bit off when
Read more →I ran across one of those character-creation sheets the other day, the ones with 200 questions that are supposed to create your unique and wonderful protagonist. As usual, my immediate reaction was severely negative, which got me thinking about why. The first problem I have with these
Read more →I’ve seen quite a few new writers come near to wrecking their work by trying to follow well-intentioned advice about what must go in a story. Oddly enough, the two most common pieces of story-wrecking advice are diametrically opposed. The first is: “Your main character must change
Read more →Voice and viewpoint are inseparable, no matter what viewpoint the writer is using. This is true of all viewpoints to some extent, but it is most evident in first person. In first person, the viewpoint character is the putative storyteller, so that character’s voice is the narrative
Read more →“Viewpoint fixes everything,” I heard a writer claim at a convention some years back. Well, that depends on what you mean by “viewpoint” and how you expect to use it to “fix” things. “Viewpoint” in fiction can mean either the viewpoint character (the narrator, through whose eyes
Read more →
