There are a couple of truisms in fiction, and one of them is “stories are about people.” I’d say “Most stories…” but unless you’re really setting out to write something like Islandia or Utopia or Voyage to Arcturus, you can pretty much go with the truism. This
Read more →I’ve had a couple of emails in the past week about writing YA or teen fiction, with emphasis on what the writer has to do differently in terms of plot, worldbuilding, characterization, description, dialog, etc. when writing for that audience. So I thought I’d talk a bit
Read more →When I was in college, I had a friend who wanted to be a fantasy writer. He had his career all planned out, and the first thing on his list was to acquire the skills and information he needed to write good fantasy. He had chosen his major and
Read more →OK, the RSS feed is not working; I am also having trouble importing paragraph breaks in the new blog. So this is going on the old blog and we’ll work on fixing the new one when my webmaster gets back next week. One of the things most
Read more →Back in my very young and salad days, when I was around 15-16, the original Star Trek series was the hot new thing on TV and my parents took me to see Leonard Nimoy in a summer-season play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. After the play,
Read more →This week, my walking buddy told me about an incident involving a mutual friend, who is a major tech consultant-type. Seems some gentleman who wanted advice on his algorithm offered to pay for two hours of critique/consulting time at a not-unreasonable-but-on-the-low-side rate. So the consultant-type agreed, took a look
Read more →An idiot plot was first defined by James Blish as a plot that only hangs together because all of the main characters act like idiots. I’d add “…when they’re not supposed to be idiots,” because there are plenty of effective (usually comic) stories where the point is that
Read more →The structure of a story is its bones – or rather, it’s the way those bones are presented to the reader, the way things are organized and the patterns they make. Like bones, there are large ones and tiny ones; chains of things that fit together to
Read more →“You can’t tell stories about sunshine.” – Garrison Keillor Last Sunday, I was listening to “A Prairie Home Companion” as I frequently do of a Sunday morning, and the news from Lake Woebegone was about a group of men going out bass fishing on a day that
Read more →Writing isn’t magic. You can’t just say “Presto! A rabbit!” and pull a rabbit out of a hat. (Well, you can, but nobody is likely to believe it.) No, if you’re going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you have to start by sneaking the
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