(Happy birthday to a friend who probably doesn’t want his name on the Internets, and welcome back to my random blog! I suppose this topic is timely on Labour Day. Guess you’ll have to read and see.) When I was in high school, my classmates and I were aware of…
Ah, the Internet. Where silly writers can post earnest pledges to which they can be held years in the future long after they’ve changed their minds. Well, general public, I am that silly writer. So today, I will be letting everyone with a connection know about the three character motivations I…
I know because I’ve made every single one of them, like, a billion times each (rounding up to the nearest billion). These hamstring my manuscripts like nothing else, and they’re so devious! It’s relatively simple to spot when I’ve taken the story on a tangent that has nothing to do…
(PRE-BLOG ANNOUNCEMENT: This is my last Sunday update! From now on, I’m switching to WEEKLY MONDAY POSTS. Just to keep you on your toes.) Once upon a time, I wrote a comedic blog entry making fun of my own embarrassment about writing a make-out scene. Then, I got a stats package…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is impossible to tell how striking a particular piece of writing is until you’ve read several dozen examples of that genre. This applies to genres of novel as much as it applies to essays and cover letters. Purely in the interests of…
I can’t explain why I have a problem writing exposition without sounding like a jerk, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
I’m over sacrifice. In fiction, that is. I’m not quite as excited as I used to be about climaxes where Mr. Spock gasps out his last words on the other side of the radioactivity-shielding glass or Harry Potter whips off his Invisibility Cloak in the middle of a Death Eater…
(But first… happy birthday, Grace! Yaaaaaay!) Almost every how-to writing book you can find advises would-be writers to read extensively. This is sound advice. Reading a lot of what you want to write helps you to understand it viscerally the same way doing lots of math problems is a different…
… I’m thinking about fiction, and you will be, too. (WARNING: due to the nature of this discussion, this blog entry will contain swear words and references to works that depict graphic violence. No graphic violence in the blog itself, though.) The first novel manuscript I ever wrote was called Just…
I spent at least an hour one Thursday last year trying to find a good cover of The Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Devil” by a female vocalist. What is slightly more disturbing is why I did this.