A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty): Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know
Read more →A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn’t know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I’ve learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because
Read more →There’s a problem I’ve noticed cropping up more and more often lately, in the way some authors first develop and then over-develop their plots and subplots, allowing both them and their characters to proliferate beyond the ability of mere mortals to keep track of them all, until
Read more →When is the story over? Really over, I mean, as in “this is the last paragraph, and what comes next is ‘The End’ at the bottom of the page.” This is usually some way after the big climax in which the central story problem is solved (they
Read more →This is the time of year when a lot of high school students are thinking about college, and as a consequence, I’ve had several earnest requests for information about the best places to go to school, what to major in, etc. Since I usually figure that what
Read more →Last post, Libby said: I’ve been having trouble with that point in a story from the lead-up to the climax to the aftermath… once I hit the part where all the stuff I’ve been alluding to has to APPEAR, things tend to go over too smoothly and
Read more →All writers are afraid of something at one point or another. We are afraid of looking foolish; we are afraid of rejection; we are afraid of overreaching, of not knowing how, of getting it wrong, of not being good enough. We’re afraid of being broke, being taken
Read more →A novel is not a movie; writing a scene is not the same as filming one. It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all
Read more →One of the things that bites even experienced writers from time to time is giving insufficient consideration to the ways their characters react to things. (Me blogging about this has nothing to do with the fact that I just turned in the copyedit for The Far West
Read more →There’s another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. And that’s the folks who think that if there is any resemblance whatsoever between what they want to write and any recent bestseller, they must be selling out. Or that everyone will think they are
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