Walk-ons

Most stories involve more than one character. Even classic castaway Man-against-Nature stories, like Robinson Crusoe and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchett, include the protagonist interacting with other characters at the beginning and end of the story. Characters get grouped into several categories. First are the protagonist and viewpoint characters,

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Adjectives and adverbs

Last week I was looking at web sites and found yet another one that advocated “Never, EVER use any adjectives or adverbs!” It went so far as to advocate going through one’s work and deleting all of them. So I decided to test that technique to see

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Playing the game

There’s a joke I heard once, about a man who prayed fervently for forty years that God would let him win the lottery. Finally one night as he was offering his prayer once again, a voice came out of the air above him and said, “Look, I

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Annual Writing Goals

New year, new year’s resolutions. There are recommendations all over the web about how to make resolutions, which ones to make, and how to keep them for longer than a week. Googling “new year’s resolutions for fiction writers” got me four million hits. So I took a

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