Writing is not a visual medium, not in the way that photographs, paintings, or movies are visual. Yet there are readers and writers who think of it this way. It’s quite common for writers to describe “the movie in my head” or “seeing the scene and just
Read more →Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know
Read more →Next week, I’m leaving on a 2-1/2 week road trip with my father. It’s not really a vacation – I’m guest of honor at Conjecture in San Diego Oct 5-7 – but Dad and I decided to take the extra time to drive out from Chicago and
Read more →There are a number of bits of wisdom that nonwriters frequently impart to writers, usually with the best of intentions. Some of them are useful and very true, like “You need to send that out, you know.” Other times…not so much. One of the not-so-much categories comes
Read more →It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of
Read more →One of the many areas that some writers find problematic about dialog is the use of idioms. This is especially tricky for SF and fantasy writers who are trying to create a realistic-sounding but still-comprehensible imaginary world. The first common mistake, especially for science fiction writers, is
Read more →Plotting a story is one of those writing things where not only does every writer work differently, every book works differently. Oh, there are patterns – I’ve talked before about my write-a-plan-and-then-toss-it method – but they never seem to work one hundred percent consistently for even one
Read more →I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with
Read more →“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” –The Naked City by Malvin Wald The thing about those eight million stories is, they’re all different from each other. And trying to make them be the same is a mistake. This
Read more →One of the questions I’ve been fielding for years, usually from knowledgeable non-writers, has to do with the similarity between being in a critique group and doing a collaboration. Sometimes it’s buried in the assumptions behind the question (“In what ways do your critique group members influence
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