My writing friend and I both lead writing groups. The two of us also enjoy discussing, even debating, the merits and shortcomings regarding various novels and movies. We usually agree, but not always. Recently he and I disagreed about just how serious plot holes are to the success of a movie. For instance, I’m a…
I blame Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, she sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she? Turns out, good beginnings are a lot harder to write than she led me to believe. I’m never taking writing advice from a singing…
You can’t make this up. I mean, my head is still spinning. Twenty-three years ago I wrote a novel called Killer Source. This was my fourth completed novel. I loved the concept. In fact, the idea came to me whole. I was driving on I-25 near Broadway, heading north, the moment it happened. I saw…
Writing lessons come from lots of places. We steal from other disciplines constantly, using terms like “architecture” to talk about plots, or “fleshing out” to talk about giving more details in scenes. Some of those terms are so ingrained in our vocabulary that we seem to think of them as idiomatic rather than what they…
Recently, I took a class from writer Alli Martin called “Writing Advice You CAN Ignore.” It was sponsored by the Orange County Library and offered for free over Zoom. From the get-go, I made several inaccurate assumptions about the class (you know the old saying about assuming). My first faulty assumption was that the Orange…