“Know your audience” is a piece of writing advice I hear a lot. I have never really understood what people mean by it. In almost every case, the explicitly stated reason behind giving the advice is that if one knows who one’s audience is, one can (and,
Read more →Every so often, I run into someone who is…a bit confused about the way magic works in fantasies. They generally fall into one of two categories—either they have read that “a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and interpreted it to mean “all magic is/should-be just
Read more →Fiction writers, especially those who write science fiction and fantasy, are fond of asserting that the best of them ask the hard questions about life and the world. This is, by and large, a good thing in general. The problem comes when it gets down to specifics.
Read more →“How did you decide what viewpoint to use for your first novel?” I was more than a little bemused by the question, because that is one of many supposedly vital writing decisions that I don’t remember making, let alone angsting over the way the questioner obviously was.
Read more →The idea that every character must have a goal and a motivation, not only for the overall story/plot but for each and every scene in that story, has always been something that I have had trouble with. That is, until I realized that my difficulty was due
Read more →A lot of story analysis and critique starts by focusing on macro-level aspects of storytelling: characterization, narrative, worldbuilding, plot, and the ways one develops or reveals these things over the course of a novel. Ultimately, though, how one presents characterization, growth, personality, action, worldbuilding, plot, and everything
Read more →Most of my regular readers seem to have realized that the only “writing rules” I believe in are the ones that involve grammar, spelling, and punctuation – and that even those are flexible, if the writer needs to play with them to get a particular effect in
Read more →“Every scene must cause or lead into the next scene.” I ran across this particular bit of writing advice recently; it was followed by a couple of tips such as “cut any scene that isn’t caused by the scene immediately before it.” Wow, that means Ian M.
Read more →“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham I love that quote. I think of it whenever I’m faced with a would-be writer or critic who is waving a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of
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