The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the
Read more →Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times,
Read more →Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers’ tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they’ve been overused and abused recently or not. They’re a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly
Read more →Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer’s thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he’s trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting
Read more →When a writer has a big, complicated novel with lots of subplots and plot arcs that need to weave around each other, there are two main things he/she needs to do: 1) keep track of all the things that are going on offstage and in different plot
Read more →First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid
Read more →The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first
Read more →This summer, I got a new car. Well, new to me – it belonged to Dad for several years, until he decided that with Mom gone, he didn’t really need two cars and he liked the other one better. Anyway, it’s a 2008 model, with lots of
Read more →One of the most frustrating things that happens to writers is having a batch of characters worked into just the right spot for the plot to take off…and discovering that they won’t do whatever is supposed to come next. When you want your characters to go left, and
Read more →In the last couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a number of new writers doing things that…well, to say they don’t work is a serious understatement. I’m not talking about the writing itself, at the moment. I’m talking about the business end. There are
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