how to write fiction

10 min read 2022-06-01 01:23:48

Write FAST & Furious! Outrunning “Spock Brain”

Original Image courtesy of David HT Flikr Creative Commons… Fast drafting is a technique that I have used successfully on quite a few books. What

3 min read 2022-06-01 01:15:39

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway told us that, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” And from there, at least, came generations of

2 min read 2022-05-25 01:14:40

This week, I’d like to mine some material from my now defunct online Worldbuilding course. This, on the subject of magic in fantasy, and to some

3 min read 2022-05-18 01:22:33

It would not be entirely correct to say that, for some decades now, my “day job” has been as an editor. To say “day job” means that it’s

5 min read 2022-05-11 01:03:43

When I first started writing—seriously writing—and started getting published, the internet was still a mostly hidden thing used by scientists and

2 min read 2022-05-03 23:37:57

Imagine my surprise when I read “Beyond the Plot: Craft Tricks of Great Commercial Thrillers” by Cassidy Lucas at, of all places, Crime Reads.

5 min read 2022-04-27 00:59:45

I bet you’ve seen these before—at least a few of them quoted here over the years. The list is all over the internet. I found it at iO9. But this

4 min read 2022-04-20 02:14:04

These three words sometimes kinda mean the same things, and sometimes kinda mean different things, but as an editor, I see them used more or less

12 min read 2022-04-15 00:20:53

Fiction filler is like fillers in food. It makes a little bit of good stuff go a lot farther, but at what cost? How much of this pink slime prose

4 min read 2022-04-13 01:25:54

We talk a lot, us writers, about productivity—how much writing we got done, how much writing we meant to get done, how much writing we should have

4 min read 2022-04-06 02:23:49

I’ve written before on the subject of a story’s first line, or a novel’s first paragraph, and starting a story—pulp fiction style—with a

3 min read 2022-03-30 00:58:37

I used to teach in-person then online courses, and one of the most popular was my worldbuilding course. Though it’s been a while since I’ve

2 min read 2022-03-23 00:50:05

A few weeks ago I talked about how, once your novel is published, it “belongs to the ages,” and I’ve written before about my ambivalence

3 min read 2022-03-16 00:59:49

I’ve written here before that we should remind ourselves that writing fiction—especially genre fiction—should be fun, that we should get in

15 min read 2022-03-11 05:50:48

Arc is critical in stories. How do the characters change? Who changes and how? What is an arc and do we need a protractor? In my last post,