I’ve seen quite a few new writers come near to wrecking their work by trying to follow well-intentioned advice about what must go in a story. Oddly enough, the two most common pieces of story-wrecking advice are diametrically opposed. The first is: “Your main character must change
Read more →In the past two months, at least five different people have said something to me along the lines of “My teacher said/some professional writer said/my crit group says/I have observed [insert writing technique] is the rule for [insert writing problem or situation]. So is that a rule?”
Read more →Last week I was looking at web sites and found yet another one that advocated “Never, EVER use any adjectives or adverbs!” It went so far as to advocate going through one’s work and deleting all of them. So I decided to test that technique to see
Read more →One of the current fundamental tenets for writing fiction is that in order to be a “good book,” the central character in the story has to change as a result of the events in it. If one attempts to question this “requirement,” one is informed that if
Read more →“Show, don’t tell” has been basic fiction writing advice since Homer. It could be rendered less colloquially as “Dramatize, don’t summarize,” but either way, it doesn’t say “Show everything, tell nothing.” This leaves many beginning authors with two unanswered questions: 1) How, exactly, is showing/dramatizing different from
Read more →The other day, I was talking books with a non-writer acquaintance who eventually got around to the perennial complaint about how Mr. Long-Time Professional Writer’s work has gone horribly downhill, paired with a certain amount of bewilderment as to how an experienced professional could ever make so
Read more →So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s
Read more →“What are the three worst or best bits of writing advice you’ve ever been given?” Somebody asked me that a while back, and it took me a while to come up with a reasonable answer, because at least one of them was perfectly horrible advice for me…but
Read more →Spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax. For a lot of would-be writers, they seem to be love ‘em or leave ‘em – which is to say, many of the folks I talk to have either an absolute slavish devotion to formal grammar, punctuation, or else a firm conviction that
Read more →I’ve been saying for a long time that there are only two rules for writing: 1) You must write, and 2) What you write has to work. And I keep running into writers at opposite ends of the spectrum who really, really, reeeeeeaaaally don’t like that. The
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