“What drives your story, plot or characters?” There are a bunch of problems with this question. First off, what drives the story isn’t an either-or dichotomy; it’s a continuum that runs from the total-action-with-cardboard-characters tale at one end to the nothing-but-character-introspection story at the other end, with
Read more →For a very long time, I thought (and I’ve said here) that I hated writing exercises and writing prompts. Then I started talking to people about writing, and some of them demanded that I give them exercises. After much thought, I came to the obvious conclusion that
Read more →Last week, I ran across a writing-advice book that focused firmly on productivity, and promised to teach you how to write thousands of words per hour. The author’s method for achieving this miracle rested on two fundamental ideas. The first was taking the writing process apart so
Read more →“Ask yourself what the worst possible thing is that you can do to your characters” is an often-repeated piece of advice that is a lot less helpful than it looks. If you follow it literally, about 99% of the time the answer is going to be “torture
Read more →Sorry, folks, but I don’t think I can type a whole blog post on my cell phonr, and my home Internet connection is toast. It needs a new cable, possibly strung from several blocks away, so I am not sure they’ll be able to get it done
Read more →Characters are the heart of a story; practically everyone says so. There are reams of writing advice covering how to come up with great characters, how to make them “round”, how to make them grow and change over the course of a book, and so on. Much
Read more →There is a thing my exercise coach occasionally says to me that is deeply annoying because it is so very, very true: Knowing how to do exercises does not make you fit; you have to actually do the exercises. This turns out to be fundamentally true of
Read more →Sorry folks – I am having internet connection issues. I’ll get this week’s post up when I can.
Read more →Sorry this is so late to post; it has been one of those weeks. This is one last plotting post, mostly trying to get at Deep Lurker’s problem of “how to get to the end” when the general endpoint is a known quantity. The two main sources
Read more →For a lot of writers, endings are the hardest part of plotting. Either they know where they want the story to end up, but not how to get there, or they know a lot of things about the story, but can’t seem to work out what the
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