First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available
Read more →Families are often hard to deal with, even if you love them. This is true in real life, but it’s even more true in fiction, especially in science fiction and fantasy. A large part of the problem is that including the hero/heroine’s family in the story means
Read more →There is really nothing like a good villain. From Blackie Duquesne to Darth Vader, they’re often the most striking and memorable characters in a story. A lot of the professional writers I know find villains a lot more fun and interesting to write about than heroes; several
Read more →One of the most frustrating things that happens to writers is having a batch of characters worked into just the right spot for the plot to take off…and discovering that they won’t do whatever is supposed to come next. When you want your characters to go left, and
Read more →One of the things that bites even experienced writers from time to time is giving insufficient consideration to the ways their characters react to things. (Me blogging about this has nothing to do with the fact that I just turned in the copyedit for The Far West
Read more →Characterization is one of the things I had a hard time getting a handle on. In my early books, I was doing it all by instinct – which was all well and good (I still do it pretty much by instinct), except that I hadn’t thought about
Read more →Years ago, before I was ever published, I was at a convention where Gordy Dickson was answering writing questions for a mob of would-be hopefuls. And somebody asked the “how do I write deep characters?” question, and I was kind of disappointed in the answer, because it
Read more →Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters – so the reader is rooting for them? This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because
Read more →There are four really, really important things to remember about characters: Characters are people. (Yes, even if they’re aliens or elves or talking rabbits.) People, and therefore characters, are all the same. People, and therefore characters, are all different. Most important of all: Every person, and therefore
Read more →I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three – plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as
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