Plot and characters go together like green eggs and ham; one without the other just isn’t as interesting. Yet a lot of writers consistently have trouble making them work together. Either they’re so focused on their characters that they forget to make the plot work, or they’re
Read more →I’ve been getting a lot of good questions lately, and I really appreciate it. However, even though Gene’s question about editing and meddling came first, I’m going to save it for next week, on the grounds that it’s about the business end, and I’ve been talking a
Read more →Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know
Read more →It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of
Read more →Writing processes are interesting things, not least because there are so many different kinds. Mine is particularly odd, in that I am neither a sit-down-and-wing-it writer, nor am I a plan-in-advance-and-stick-to-the-plan writer. I’m smack in the middle of the range, a plan-in-advance-and-then-periodically-throw-away-the-plan writer. The reason why I
Read more →One of the really interesting things about older how-to-write books is their take on viewpoint. Several don’t mention it at all; others give it barely a passing glance. When they do talk about it, it’s from a completely different angle from that taken by modern how-to-write authors.
Read more →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
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