Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my
Read more →Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer’s success and/or fame and that writer’s ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once
Read more →Having just talked a bit about beginnings, I’m now going to talk about endings…sort of. Specifically, I’m going to talk about chapter endings, because when you’re writing a novel, you end up having to do quite a lot of those. A good chapter ending, from the point
Read more →It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a “hook” – something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what “hooks” one reader will annoy or
Read more →Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I’m now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they’re useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren’t as developed
Read more →Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see
Read more →Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Algis Budrys wrote an excellent series of columns for LOCUS magazine on what he called “cinematic prose,” using his Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon as an example. Alas, my copies have long since vanished into wherever things go when one
Read more →I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call “sloppy omniscient viewpoint.” Most of the time, a given scene would have a “viewpoint character,” but whenever I thought someone else’s thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character’s head for
Read more →As I’ve said before, the terms “viewpoint” and “point of view” can mean two different things: either the viewpoint character or the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person). I’m using it in the second sense today. Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the
Read more →There seem to be two basic myths about How Writers Work. The first is the painfully slow, unbelievably picky Brooding Poetic Genius typified by the Oscar Wilde remark about having a good day writing because he’d spent the morning removing a comma and the afternoon putting it
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