Next in our series of posts expanding on my Writing Tips list, we have: Open active: Start scene with changes underway and then explain how you got there…unless change are significant. First: what do I mean by openings? In this case, I mean the beginnings to new scenes and chapters. Much of this…
Interior Dialogue: Readers don't trust dialogue. Have your characters think, and have what they think be juxtaposed to the dialogue, showing a new angle. This one I learned the hard way. When I first started writing novels, I was under the impression that the best writing was like a screen play, all dialogue. So, I…
Next in our reboot of my Writing Tips article is: Senses: Add two to five senses to every description. Hot and tasty! Two senses at once! When I started writing, I used to swap the pages I finished that week with two writer friends. We would read each other’s work and send back comments. My…
In honor of Christmas, here’s a reposting of my article on writing about Angels. Some things are intrinsically hard to write about. Angels may be one of those things. I have almost never seen them done well in fiction. I have, however, read really stirring accounts of people who believe that they have seen real…
The Magic of Shakespeare–an article on me about the status of fantasy then and now, with some interesting factoids about Shakespeare's time and plays. From the Ghetto to Literary Old Town: The Magic of Shakespeare Before we examine this question, let us examine a few others first: Fantasies are fun! Why doesn’t everybody read them?…
All About The Magic, Or the Gosling of the Golden Creek Vs. The Unicorn Pooper-Scoopers This post appears at Magical Words, a website on the art of writing maintained by a number of fantasy writers, including: David B. Coe (D.B. Jackson), Misty Massey, and Faith Hunter If you are a fan of the magic of…
Here is an article on Character I did for GliphoWriMo. Imagine that you and I are standing in front of an easel upon which an artist has drawn a circle. It’s just a circle. We tilt our head left and right, but there’s nothing else there. One line. Round. Flat. Then, the artist…
Somehow, last week, I skipped over The Trick–my favorite writing tip of them all! The Trick: Raising expectations in one direction but having the story first go in the opposite direction. The Trick is the secret to writing, the thing that makes a story work: expectation followed by something other than the expected outcome…
Nausicca, having removed off her breather-mask The Foil: Use other characters to showcase the strengths of your main characters and to show how they are extraordinary. The best example of the idea of a “foil”—in fact the place that the term comes from—is Hal from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part One. In what is probably…
Mephisto Prospero contemplating the Two Strings Technique Two Strings: Two separate issues need to be going in each scene. In art, we create the illusion of three dimensions with contrast. A single line forming a circle looks two-dimensional to the eye. Add shading around one side and suddenly it looks like a ball…