As a mystery novelist, I tend to be cavalier about murder—most authors are. The typical fiction writer thinks nothing of crafting a scene of mayhem. Death comes easy. Books on writing and writers’ workshops traditionally refer to eliminating unnecessary characters, wonky plot-lines, or even unruly sentences as “killing your darlings.” As media consumers, we’ve viewed countless…
When I was a computer programmer, a co-worker and I were taking the bus to our respective homes after work. It was rush hour and the bus was full, so we were standing. We started taking about the project we were working on. After a few minutes a man sitting in the seat next to…
Last month I “attended” the virtual StokerCon 2021 conference, run by the Horror Writers Associarion. If you see a conference run by the “[genre] Writers of America” or “[genre] Writers Association”, you can count on there being a lot of panels on writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and other writing-related topics. And that, friends, means it’s…
Story beginnings are challenging. On the one hand, you’ve got all the excitement of getting to know your characters and their dilemmas for the first time, and you haven’t yet hit the point where flaws begin to raise their thorny heads. Ah, young love! On the other hand, those first-draft opening pages are seldom the…
Hello! Now, I’m going to say some controversial things, but please, please, don’t clutch your pearls in horror after I say them. OK. Are you ready? I LOVE a robust outline. When some people write outlines for their novels, they’re essentially talking about some short hand notes they made, their vision for the ending and…