Achillean Romance with Fangs
Sometimes I feel like my writing ability is barely edging forward—that if my skill is growing, it’s only doing so under the surface. But then I look at the difference in the same basic scene I wrote in my first novel and in my fifth, and it’s breathtaking. In the first, a young woman discovers […]
First off, you have to know these two things: Your first draft of your first book will be terrible. All your favorite authors of all time wrote a terrible first draft of their first book too. Probably a terrible second and third draft, maybe even a terrible second and third book. This is okay. It can […]
Writing diversity isn’t “forced.” What’s forced in writing is continuously cherry pick the situations in which many groups have been deliberately forced outby the one group who prides themselves as being ‘the norm.’ Let me explain: While the world is very diverse, there are situations and areas where someone could justify not including diversity (such as if you were writing […]
The inability to write what you’ve outlined plagues many of us, and it has many potential causes, some of which have workarounds, while others don’t. Here’s just a couple: 1. You don’t know your characters well enough when you outline, so when you write them, they make unexpected choices. Solution: Develop your characters through writing before […]
If you want to write as a career you’ll have to write on days you don’t want to. You’ll have to write when you aren’t motivated, when you aren’t in the mood, when writing isn’t any fun. Just because writing is something people can have fun doing, doesn’t mean it’s not a challenging and often tiresome career choice. Just as […]
I’ve been running my characters through these questions so I thought I might as well share them. They are meant to be a fun but challenging look at how your characters are going to interact with each other and the plot. The examples and explanations are simplistic versions and some stories (especially complex ones) will […]
As I’ve grown as a writer, one unexpected change in the way I view and critique other stories is that I no longer see stories on a scale of good to bad, but from finished to unfinished. There are rarely ‘bad’ stories, only stories that needed more work to reach their true potential: stories that needed faster […]
(A continuation of the feverish analysis in this post.) Let’s now consider a reader who has no idea what an elephant is. We the writer want to present our reader with words aligned in just the right way that we paint a picture of an elephant that will let the reader perfectly imagine it exactly as we […]
(And why I stopped querying my novel.) As some of you know, I was querying Iron From Fire on and off from March through May, and I recently decided to quit, despite it being overall a good story written in what one editor described as ‘on par’ for the genre. And I think it’s important to talk […]
There are a lot of odd rules floating around about descriptions (some of which are useful and others… not so much), but to form writing theories that any writer can apply to their own work without losing their personal style, we often need to step back from the “rules” and examine things more broadly. There […]
