I got in a discussion the other day with a writer friend who’s having difficulty moving forward with her story. I’m having similar problems, so we sat down to compare notes. “So what’s the plot?” I said, because I’m a plotty kind of writer. “Well, there’s this
Read more →Some while back, I was talking with long-time writer friends about the good old days, and I had an epiphany. I was complaining about how The New Thing is refusing to go anywhere and various of my usual tricks and techniques weren’t working, and I realized that
Read more →One of the things writers get asked about a lot is how we do it, either specifically (“How do you plan an action scene?”) or in general (“Where do you get your ideas?”). A lot of the time, it’s fairly evident that the person asking the question
Read more →Back in the mid 1990s, shortly after Dealing with Dragons came out, I was asked to join a panel of folks to talk about dragons, and the topic I was handed to talk about was “Dragons and Gender Bias.” After blinking several times, I asked the moderator just
Read more →I spent last time talking about a manuscript full of stupid mistakes that didn’t work. This time, I’m going to talk about some where it does. Because in real life, people forget critical information, give in to impulses that turn out to be a Really Bad Idea,
Read more →As some of you already know, I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on literature and theory and basically all the college-level English stuff I didn’t take in college. One of the recent lectures examined two books that, in the words of the lecturer, each began
Read more →Theme is one of the most difficult aspects of fiction to discuss. This is partly because there are so many different ways of looking at it…and because there is no one clear, simple definition that everybody agrees on. “The definition of theme” ranges from the simple and
Read more →Some while back, I had a conversation with a reader. It went on for quite a while, but I can sum it up pretty quickly: Him: “That book is terrible. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It has a prophecy in it. Stories with prophecies in them are
Read more →I’m going to be taking Wednesday off, as I have things to do on Christmas other than compose a blog post; therefore here is a slightly-early Christmas present for everybody. Alexandria and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good Very Bad Slush Pile (With apologies to Judith Viorst) I wake
Read more →One of the first things most people realize after they’ve sold their first novel is that, contrary to expectation, they haven’t reached the top of the tree. Instead, they’re now on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder. This comes as a great shock to some
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