November approaches, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month, a “writing event” that involves people all over the world trying to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November. Along with NaNoWriMo comes, inevitably, a flock of earnest would-be writers asking whether
Read more →I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word
Read more →One of the things writers are urged to do, over and over, is to create characters who grow and change over the course of their adventures. Obviously, growth and change are not an absolute requirement; there are plenty of long-running series in which the characters are exactly the
Read more →One of the questions I get asked a lot is “how did you decide to be a writer?” And the short answer is, I didn’t. Oh, I’ve been writing since I started my first (unfinished, unpublishable) novel in seventh grade, but it was always about writing, not
Read more →There is no bad way to write a story. No editor cares how you wrote it. No editor, to my knowledge, has ever rejected a story on the grounds that the author did not have a plan, character sketches, maps, or time lines before writing the story.
Read more →January of 2010 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first time six would-be writers in Minneapolis got together and formed a critique group. Within five years, all seven of the eventual members sold, and six are still publishing (the seventh went back to his first love, music and
Read more →An awful lot of the techniques that get used in fiction have applications in nonfiction as well. They’re not necessary in nonfiction, but they can add a lot of appeal, interest, and readability, among other things. One of the less obvious candidates for this sort of usefulness
Read more →Back in high school, I had a marvelous history teacher who made a point of going into more than memorizing dates and names and places. One of the key things I took away from that class was the concept of necessary and sufficient causes, and the difference
Read more →Every story, short or long, takes place somewhere. Every scene takes place somewhere. And every place has features about it that are unique, whether it is the collection of overly cute fairy-figurines on the mantelpiece in the parlor, the cracked and faded mural across the back wall of the
Read more →I have several friends (some professional writers, some not) who consider themselves conflict-averse. Faced with the near-universal insistence on conflict as the primary factor in plotting, they either hunch down, grumbling, and attempt to provide enough murders, fights, and battles to fill this presumed need, or they
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