There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look. First, a definition: as far as I’m concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it
Read more →Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued,
Read more →Every so often, I get asked what the difference is between writing fantasy and writing realistic fiction. It’s a pretty good question, though since I’ve never written anything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I’m not sure why anyone expects me to know. (Of course, I have
Read more →Some people are afraid to exercise their talents, or afraid that if they try, they will fail and have to face just how little talent they have. But far more are just simply not interested enough. Writing a book sounds like a nice thing to do —
Read more →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
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