There’s a recurring writing argument that revolves around which type(s) of viewpoint are “too easy” or “too hard” or problematic in some other way, such that writers (especially beginners, but when you look a little closer, it sounds a lot like “all writers”) should be discouraged from
Read more →It’s one month to the official launch of The Dark Lord’s Daughter, and I’m twitchier than usual. The official launch party is at the Red Balloon Bookstore in St. Paul on Tuesday September 5. If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities, check their events page—they
Read more →Revisions. For some writers, they’re impossible. For other writers, they’re a potentially endless attempt to coerce their story into an impossible perfection. For still others, they’re the easy part (or at least, the easier part, better than coming up with a first draft. Like everything else in
Read more →So far, I’ve been mostly talking about the standard lump-of-description—the “descriptive paragraph” that many of us got assigned to write in middle school, the sort of thing that Deep Lurker summed up as something that needs cutting back to an amount most people want to read. Today
Read more →I think it was in fifth grade that I learned my first important principle of description, which a number of commenters on last week’s post mentioned—namely, to make use of all five senses, not just sight. Poul Anderson said once that he went over every page to
Read more →Description is usually considered as a part of worldbuilding. This makes sense, because everything in a story is part of the story-world (whether that’s Alpha Centauri Three, modern-day Beijing, or a tiny prehistoric fishing village), and every part of the story-world tells the reader more about what
Read more →Right from the start, I’ve tended to write stories that have lots of characters. Everybody seems to have their sisters and their cousins and their aunts…and children, parents, brothers, uncles, and grandparents and friends, all of whom have friends and family of their own. I also often
Read more →One of the most common bits of writing advice is variously phrased as “Make the reader fall in love with your characters,” “Make your characters likeable,” “Make your characters sympathetic,” and, most generally, “Make the reader care about your characters.” There are three problems with this advice.
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