Bland or Beautiful: Standing Out from the Crowd
Recently I’ve been entering some Goodreads giveaways, because, free books. Since ideally I’d like to get books I want to read, I check...
Guns-on-the-Wall
If a writer tailors their writing toward a reader, rather than writing something intended to be purely private, they need to keep the...
Precise or Purple: How Much Detail Is Too Much?
This is a hard question, because tastes differ a lot from writer to writer and from reader to reader. Between Hemingway and Melville is...
Making Magic Real Part II: What Is It Like?
Once you’ve hammered out your consistent rules for magic, you need to write it so the reader believes in it. And that means...
Writing Combat if You're Not a Fighter
Aside from gym courses in archery and fencing when I was in college, I have never studied any form of fighting. The fencing class gave...
Themes: What Are They, Really?
Whenever someone writes a story, it’s about something. That may seem self-evident; obviously a story has a plot and characters whose...
Character Vs. Narrator Epic Smackdown
I am the Narrator. It’s my job to create the story and to decide what the characters do and don’t see. I have to decide whose eyes the...
Workshopping: The Sound and the Fury
I’m a big fan of workshopping, even though my experiences doing so have been decidedly mixed. Starting at age fourteen, and for close to...
