Ursula le Guin was one of the greats of the SF/F field. It hurts to have to write that sentence in the past tense, even though 88 years is a good run by anyone’s standards. I’ve been reading le Guin’s work since I was thirteen and Rocannon’s
Read more →Everyone I know wants to do good work. Very few will admit to wanting their work to be perfect, either because they’ve had “nothing’s perfect” drummed into them, because they don’t want to appear to be saying that they are so good they can write perfect fiction
Read more →Writers use a variety of different metaphors to describe how they think about plot and structure. One that I’ve seen used quite a bit is “beads on a string” – that is, figuring out a plot is a process of lining up a series of beads/scenes in
Read more →It’s a new year, and for the last week or so, people have been talking about New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists. “Write a book” seems to turn up with enormous frequency on lists like “The Top Fifty New Year’s Resolutions of 2015/16/17/18” and “100 Things You
Read more →I will be back with your regularly scheduled blog post next week. In the meantime, best wishes and happy whatever-you-celebrate.
Read more →Flashbacks and flashforwards are essentially the same technique. They take a reader from the current moment of the story to a different time (the past, for a flashback; the future, for a flashforward) and then return to the current story moment. Flashbacks are the most commonly used,
Read more →In one sense, all narrators are unreliable. Whether first-person, tight-third, or omniscient, every narrator (like every human being) has his, her, or its own worldview and personal biases that affect the way they tell the story. Even if all of them were totally objective, the author, also
Read more →A character’s backstory – all the stuff that happened to them prior to the start of the novel – starts with the highs, lows, traumas, and major life events of the character’s past. This is the stuff that has shaped the character’s personality – what they want,
Read more →While the amount of backstory the writer needs to make up, and whether they make it up in advance or as they write, varies a lot depending on the writer’s process, the amount that goes into the story has almost nothing to do with the writer’s process,
Read more →Backstory is one of the most potentially useful tools in the writer’s toolbox; it’s also one of the most often misused. First, a definition: Backstory, as I use the term, is anything and everything relevant that has happened prior to the start of the story. For most
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