For a very long time, I thought (and I’ve said here) that I hated writing exercises and writing prompts. Then I started talking to people about writing, and some of them demanded that I give them exercises. After much thought, I came to the obvious conclusion that
Read more →Last week, I ran across a writing-advice book that focused firmly on productivity, and promised to teach you how to write thousands of words per hour. The author’s method for achieving this miracle rested on two fundamental ideas. The first was taking the writing process apart so
Read more →“Ask yourself what the worst possible thing is that you can do to your characters” is an often-repeated piece of advice that is a lot less helpful than it looks. If you follow it literally, about 99% of the time the answer is going to be “torture
Read more →Sorry, folks, but I don’t think I can type a whole blog post on my cell phonr, and my home Internet connection is toast. It needs a new cable, possibly strung from several blocks away, so I am not sure they’ll be able to get it done
Read more →Characters are the heart of a story; practically everyone says so. There are reams of writing advice covering how to come up with great characters, how to make them “round”, how to make them grow and change over the course of a book, and so on. Much
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