First a couple of announcements and links. This is the last week to apply for the Odyssey Workshop class on worldbuilding that I will be teaching in January. The sign-up page is at https://odysseyworkshop.org/worldbuilding.html; there are also some posts at https://www.facebook.com/OdysseyWorkshop, https://twitter.com/OdysseyWorkshop, and https://www.instagram.com/odysseyworkshop/. And I had a lovely
Read more →One of the ways writers attempt to make themselves produce more words fast is to give themselves quotas and/or deadlines. “I will write 1,000 words/four pages/for three hours every day/week/month.” Most of the time, this doesn’t work terribly well for me, for several reasons. The most obvious
Read more →A character’s backstory – all the stuff that happened to them prior to the start of the novel – starts with the highs, lows, traumas, and major life events of the character’s past. This is the stuff that has shaped the character’s personality – what they want,
Read more →One of the reasons I spent the last two posts on the process part of revision is that I believe that understanding your process saves enormous amounts of time in the long run. Specifically, having some idea how your first-draft process works and what exactly you’re trying
Read more →Ultimately, writing is all about keeping the reader reading. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to do this, ranging from cheap tricks to dense psychological analysis. Ultimately, though, all of them are a means to an end, and the end boils down to this:
Read more →For a lot of writers, endings are the hardest part of plotting. Either they know where they want the story to end up, but not how to get there, or they know a lot of things about the story, but can’t seem to work out what the
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