Writing Tip: Three Reasons to Force Yourself to Take Field Trips
Some writers are the ‘let me go sit outside in the sun and write in my notebook’ kind of writers. If you’re on this blog, and you’re a writer, there’s a good chance that you’re like me, which means...
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Tips for Planning your Plot: Frustrate the Reader
Stories should make us suffer. It’s our lot in life. Image courtesy of the Wookiepedia. One of the things I’ve noticed while moonlighting as a…ahem…reasonably priced and quite helpful…freelance...
View ArticleSetting Up the Obvious: Should Writers Ever Waste their Readers’ Time?
It’s easy to spot in storytelling: the main character, a mid-life crisis type in a tired marriage, runs into an old high school crush and they have a flirty conversation. Readers–both unobservant and...
View ArticleThree ways to save a scene you lack confidence in
We all know what it’s like to be drunk on the sound and sense of an active keyboard. Some days we stare at a blank screen and aren’t sure we’ll ever write anything ever again. Then all of a sudden you...
View ArticleWriting Tip of the Day: Stop and Smell the Roses
I’m no poet. I never had much interest in being one. That doesn’t mean that I don’t admire a poetic turn of phrase. Sometimes, writing a prose novel becomes an exercise in accidental poetry. The...
View ArticleWriting Tip: Using Fractured Ensembles to Craft Compelling Narratives
Lately I’ve been thinking about two types of narratives that involve character ensembles. These are not the only two types of such narratives, but they are frequent in speculative fiction....
View ArticleWriter’s rehab: tips for escaping the nonwriting death spiral
For some people writing every day is a necessity. But for many of us, writing can easily become a chore that we know we ought to do every day but struggle to accomplish when we know we’re not “feeling...
View ArticleGoing Beyond Fads in Writing
When reading a novel written before the 20th century I am always impressed by the amount of stylistic things that were perfectly permissible (and even desirable) back then that are taboo now. Take, for...
View ArticleWriter’s Toolbox Tip: How Martha Stewart Helped Me Write Better Dialogue
I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because proofreading my own writing at three in the morning is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I think I’ve said it about a hundred times before on...
View ArticleWriting Tip Wednesday: Emergency Lever
It’s Wednesday night, and I need to write. The goal: 500 words. The time: all night if I must. Can I do it, you ask? You’re goddamn right I can. Will it be any good? That’s the question we don’t...
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