It has taken me a long, long time to really begin to understand how the story structures people describe—the various act structures, the hero’s journey, the pick-a-number “basic plots,” and so on—interact with the writing process for different writers. A large part of the problem is that
Read more →I never had any formal academic training in writing novels. I barely have any training in analyzing and interpreting literature—my last English course was my senior year in high school. When it comes to writing, I’m pretty much self-taught. I do have some small experience with workshops,
Read more →In the writing field, people who “just sit down and write” are named pantsers (as in, writing by the seat of their pants), in contrast to planners, who supposedly write bucketfuls of notes beforehand. Reality, in my experience, is a bit different. First off, in my experience
Read more →When I’m between books, I frequently check out different writing systems, hoping I’ll find something that will make starting up the next book easier. Lately, I’ve run across quite a few “how to write a novel” systems that take a fractal approach to writing a novel. For
Read more →WARNING: A Facebook “fan page” for me has been hacked; we’re working on getting it fixed, but it is going to take time because I didn’t set the thing up myself. In the meantime, I’m told that scammers do this to try to get followers’ emails and
Read more →Creativity is not a well-understood thing. Most people have no trouble recognizing its results, but they have a lot more trouble recognizing creativity in process…sometimes, even when it’s their own. People keep trying to break down the creative process into neat little boxes, in an attempt to
Read more →November is possibly the second-worst month in which to start a new novel. I’d peg December as the worst one, for the same reason: everyone is always extra busy and distracted during the end-of-year holidays. (These are also bad months for trying to finish a novel. In
Read more →Curious about people’s thoughts on natural length. Mine seems to be the novella (first work was 26k and second is just under 50k) which is awkward for doing anything with in traditional publishing (and I am not cut out for self publishing). –Rose What do you do
Read more →Over the years, I’ve noticed that at a lot of conventions, there’s a writing-advice panel with a title like “Picking Writing Tips and Tricks that Work for You.” They almost always end up going in one of two directions—either they turn into a list of the tips
Read more →Writing is a complicated balancing act. It’s not just a two-factor problem—this much dialog versus that much action. It’s dialog balanced against action balanced against description balanced against characterization; pacing vs. clarity vs. structure vs. depth; outlining vs. drafting vs. revising. The thing about complicated balancing acts
Read more →
