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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 …
Your characters didn't appear out of the ether, newly created on page one of your book. At least, they shouldn't feel like they did. They had lives before the story starts, families, jobs, religious affiliations, pets. If you're going to make them feel real to the reader, you need to know their backstories. You need …
Because, of course, then you'll be liberated from the fear of offending them. Or you can write about them, even better, right? You can write about how crazy they were or how they treated you or what they did to keep you from writing. Right? It's true that writers need to be a little fearless …
Continue reading "Bad Advice: Write Like Your Parents Are Already Dead"
Short answer? Go for it. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You've probably heard someone tell you this by now. That they don't want "politics" in science fiction, or horror, or Disney Princess fanfic. Of course we all know what they really mean. They don't want you to write anything that disagrees with their personal …
It's one of the great cliche responses to science fiction. "Earth has dozens of different biomes, but every planet in sci fi is just one thing, either it's all desert or all frozen or..." It's easy to see why this bothers so many people watching science fiction movies. It's very true that Earth has a …
For Valentine's day, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts on one of the hardest things in fiction--writing effective love stories. This is one of those things that's so much easier to do in a screenplay. Of course Trinity falls in love with Neo--have you seen him? He looks just like Keanu Reeves! In …
There are days when you just can't write. You can have the world's best idea, be sitting in the world's best writing chair... and nothing comes. When it feels like every sentence you put down just takes you farther from what you wanted to say. And you know what? Sometimes there is no solution, except …
