For several decades now, I have been a staunch supporter of the notion that “good writing” is subjective, and therefore not a terribly useful standard for people who want to become writers. Looking at my recent posts, it’s been a while since I talked about this directly
Read more →I thought the nonsense about “weak verbs” in fiction died some time during the pandemic. Apparently, I was wrong; somebody helpfully forwarded a list of “weak verbs you should never use in your writing” recently. Which inspired this post. The first problem with talking about “weak verbs”
Read more →Probably the third or fourth thing I get asked by would-be writers—after “Where do you get your ideas?”, “Are you working on the next book? When will it be finished?”, and “I have this great idea; how about you write it and we split the money?”—is “How
Read more →“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
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