“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” – Lewis Carroll One of the things I didn’t understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I
Read more →“I don’t CARE what happens to these people.” – Dorothy J. Heydt Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they’re about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of
Read more →“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar,
Read more →Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a
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 →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
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