“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx Every so often, someone comes up to me at a social event and after talking for a while, they come out with “I have a
Read more →Every story needs to open with a hook, or so says conventional writing wisdom. Conventional writing wisdom, unfortunately, seldom goes on to address the obvious question: Just what is a hook, anyway? And how do you write one? There are three things everybody seems to agree upon
Read more →There are other kinds of worldbuilding besides the deep-background variety I was talking about last post, to wit, the immediate-background sort and the in-story sort. The immediate-background worldbuilding, like deep worldbuilding, is stuff that not everyone needs to do in advance. It’s very similar to the deep-worldbuilding
Read more →A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out one of the several reasons I’ve been having so much difficulty booting up The New Thing. It’s because for my last eight to ten books, I haven’t had to do any deep worldbuilding, because all of them came
Read more →It’s pretty easy for most writers to get about four chapters into something based on an interesting idea/situation/character/plotpoint and a bunch of mysterious happenings. But somewhere around Chapter 4, one hits what has been variously termed “the wall,” “the first veil,” or “the first event horizon.” Sometimes
Read more →For a certain kind of writer, the opening of a story is easy and fun – you get to allude to mysterious events and drop ominous clues. And then comes the middle, where all the stuff you’ve been alluding to has to start showing up and actually
Read more →The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the
Read more →Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times,
Read more →The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first
Read more →A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty): Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know
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