“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” – L.P. Hartley One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous
Read more →What first inspired you to write? I hate questions like this because they make so many assumptions about “inspiration.” But since you ask… Probably a combination of my mother, my father, and the family I grew up in. This tends not to be the answer people are
Read more →As any devoted Heinlein fan knows, TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It’s one of those obvious truths about the world, like Murphy’s Law, that ought to go without saying, yet people seem to need to be reminded of it over
Read more →Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer’s success and/or fame and that writer’s ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once
Read more →There seem to be two basic myths about How Writers Work. The first is the painfully slow, unbelievably picky Brooding Poetic Genius typified by the Oscar Wilde remark about having a good day writing because he’d spent the morning removing a comma and the afternoon putting it
Read more →A bit over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain made the famous remark that “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.” At around the same time, Gustave Flaubert came up with his le seule
Read more →Back in 1947, in an essay titled “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (since reprinted several times), Robert Heinlein wrote five rules for people who want to become professional writers. They’ve been republished many times, and for the most part, they’re still good (I’ll get to that
Read more →These days, when people talk about a “Cinderella Story,” they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it’s a Cinderella sports team that’s just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling’s welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what
Read more →Sooner or later, most writers go through a period of worrying that their work is full of clichés. Some folks take this to ridiculous extremes; one person I ran into was worried about their heroine’s hair color, because it just seemed clichéd to have her be blonde,
Read more →A bit ago, I got asked to do my standard rant on this. I put it off ’til the book was done, but it’s done now. So here’s the short form: Read a story. Does it work? Yes? Then it’s good. The problem with the term “good
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