The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for your in-laws), brings up the obvious impossibility of whatever giant task you
Read more →Technology changes the way we work. Everybody knows this, but there is nothing quite like having your Internet go out to bring it home to you. Last week’s infrastructure failure made me think about how my writing process has changed over time. I started my first book
Read more →Scene choreography or planning is a thing that some writers do up front, some do as a routine part of their process, and some hardly ever bother with even though they’re not pantsers, strictly speaking. What I’m talking about here is a whole class of preparation variously
Read more →A long time back, I heard a story about a man who wanted a famous artist to draw him a picture of a cat. “Come back in a year,” the artist told him. A year later, the man returned, eagerly anticipating the masterpiece that had taken the
Read more →One of the ways writers make progress in their work is by answering questions: Who murdered the butler? Why did the rabbit stew explode? Where did George get those kneebles, and what is he planning to do with them? But in order to answer a question, one
Read more →Storyboarding is a structure analysis technique that comes out of the film industry, where it’s been used since the very early days to give writers, directors, and producers a sort of visual outline of a film. A true storyboard is a series of drawings, each of which
Read more →This is the last post on software stuff, I promise. I’d planned to start by saying that all anyone really needs is a basic text editor, but then I ran across Writemonkey. It is the most basic text editor I’ve seen since 1982 – the only thing
Read more →After a bunch of writing and due consideration, I changed my mind about what I’m doing in this post. I’m going to start with two posts on the basic features you see in writing software, and then look at a couple of specific programs. Because I was
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