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Ideas come in many shapes and sizes. Some need the room afforded by a full novel to be explored. Others work better in shorter forms. It's common enough wisdom that short stories can be harder to write than novels, but it's worth exploring why. A novel is a world that your readers will live in …
Continue reading "Short Story or Novel? The First Tricky Decision"
If you're going to write genre, with rich world-building and complicated future technology and deep magic systems, it's going to happen sooner or later: you'll need to explain what a Florznap is. Whether it's describing why your hero's sword is different from what the reader thinks of when they imagine a sword, or the details …
Continue reading "Stumbling Through The Minefield: Expository Depth"
When was the last time you had to make a big decision in your life? Was it easy? Was there one specific reason why you made the decision you did, or were you conflicted, with several factors pulling you in different directions? Typically real human beings are under the constant sway of multiple urges, desires, …
WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this one, especially if you're not up to date on Westworld. Words, like knives, grow dull with extended use. Language changes over time with the push and pull of invisible social forces--terms of art and technical jargon, once adopted into the zeitgeist, transforms like metamorphic rock. Think of the meme--once …
We are told, over and over again, that only flawed characters are interesting. That characters who are simply heroic, or competent, are boring--they make the right decisions, they figure out the mystery, but they fail to grow as people. Even worse, readers can't relate to them and will find them dull. This ignores the fact …
Clichés are annoying and facile but they typically come into being for a reason. Something in them tends to be true or useful. Of all the clichés in genre writing I hold the least bearable, the realization that a character "had the power inside themselves all along" is one of the most nauseating. For writers, …
The premise of your story is fantastic, and the characters are well-defined. Yet something seems missing. Your plot is just going through the motions, or maybe the central challenge of the story just seems too easy for the characters to overcome. It's not... bad, it's just not exciting. Or funny. Or stirring. It's too straightforward …
Continue reading "Trouble Your Darlings: Bringing Life to Pallid Plots"
I want to talk about the way time functions inside a story--specifically within prose fiction. It's all about subjectivity. This may be the crucial difference between books and movies, actually. Time is a director's medium--in a movie time can be measured in footage, in actual minutes of runtime. You know how long it will take …
Verisimilitude is one of the most powerful devices at the author's disposal. The ability to create a world that feels real can separate a good story from a great one. Readers are much more easily drawn into a world with systems and rules they already comprehend, and characters that feel real are characters who can …
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