“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
Read more →So back to plot, more directly. The next step, after assembling a huge pile of things that could happen, is arranging all the pieces into a coherent narrative. Note that I said “coherent,” not “complete.” There will undoubtedly still be gaps; the point is to get a
Read more →“The best ideas don’t need to be sought out at all; you just have to train yourself not to swerve out of the way when they jump out in front of you.” – Jon Forss Brainstorming is a mental activity, so it is unsurprising that most of
Read more →“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas, and only keep the good ones.” – Linus Pauling Once you know how you work best and what you do and do not know about your story, you actually have to sit
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