So you have a bunch of characters, and you want your readers to get to know them. How do you do that? Well, how do you get to know people in real life? You find out about them based on what other people say about them (“”He’s
Read more →In the comments on our last exciting episode, accio_aqualung asked: So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in
Read more →There’s a range of writing types, from people who hate revising and who want to write it down and be done with it, to people who can’t let go of anything and who keep changing it. The trick is to find a balance point that works for you.
Read more →“How could you write about anything without wondering if it was true? I mean, you’d be describing a bird in a garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” (Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, Harpers,
Read more →Once you “have an idea,” the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story. How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect
Read more →The single most common question people ask writers — especially SF/F writers — is “Where do you get your ideas?” The assumption always seems to be that ideas are hard to come by. But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard. For instance, anyone can sit
Read more →For some reason, I keep running into writers — mostly those who aren’t yet published, but sometimes ones who are — who seem to have gotten the impression that there is some sort of checklist that editors work through before they’ll buy a book. I ran into
Read more →One of the things nobody ever mentioned to me when I was getting started as a writer was that if I ever got to be a full-time professional, I was going to be, in essence, a self-employed businessperson, with all the troubles and responsibilities (assorted taxes, health
Read more →Exactly what constitutes “good writing” is a subjective judgment, and it can be extremely hard to separate from one’s personal taste – not the least because one is unlikely to read books one doesn’t like, and if one doesn’t read them, one can’t tell whether they’re “good writing”
Read more →Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendance. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that
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