Writing advice is everywhere. Good writing advice? Not so much. My sole point this month is to get yourself connected to Collaborist. Here’s your portal: https://collaborist.org/ I highly recommend the YouTube chats. Here. Sample topics: And on and on. The co-hosts are Jason Buchholz and Ben LeRoy. The chat is always calm, low-key, and grounded…
Tag: Advice
Ten Things
Ten Things This sticker. Is it perfect or what? Courtesy of Erin Flanagan. Erin won Best First Novel at the Edgar Awards (Mystery Writers of America) this year. Her novel, Deer Season, is unique. Yes, it’s a mystery. But it’s not written as a mystery. Proof that the “rules” are bendable, malleable, there to be…
Plotting Whiplash
I remember reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever as a teen and feeling frustrated. At the time, I didn’t have the experience to define the source of that frustration, but later in life I was able to put my finger on it. I was reading good-sized books about epic fantasy adventures,…
What We Like to Hear. What We Don’t Like to Hear. What We Need to Hear.
I remember one or two arguments with my mom when I was little where she insisted she had told me something and I swore I’d never heard it. Later, when I was married, these arguments went both ways—one of us insisting we told the other something and they swearing we never did. I have since…
Dialects: To Phoneticize or Not To Phoneticize
When writing dialog for a character who speaks with an accent or dialect, the question always comes up – do you spell their quirks of speech phonetically (“Oy, ‘ow loverly that ‘oman be!”) or merely mention the accent and then go on to write their dialog in plain English? For myself, I don’t mind phonetically…