In any given situation, each individual involved in that situation will perceive the exact same things happening in different—sometimes shockingly different—ways. That’s why crime scene witness testimony is often contradictory. The same concept should be true in every scene we write in our stories. No two characters will experience the events within a scene in…
I’m still battling with the age-old writers’ conundrum regarding outlining and plotting. It could be that my resistance to outlining stems from quite a few years working as a tech writer. I’ve written a hundred user manuals for numerous software programs and technical procedures, none of which I could have started or completed without an…
Here’s actor Jeremy Renner on a recent episode of the Smartless podcast. “I don’t really believe in hobbies. Either you do something or you don’t, right? I don’t have time to just dip my toe in the water. I’m not taking a ******* bath here in life.” Where do you categorize your writing? If you’re…
One of my college English professors told the story of a British Shakespeare expert who carried a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare onto a plane. The plane was hijacked by a terrorist with a gun. The terrorist shot at the professor, who shielded his chest with the 1,923-page volume of Shakespeare. The bullet lodged in…
In my MFA program, I learned about hybrid forms as a common technique in experimental literary fiction and poetry, but lately I’ve noticed it more often in the genre fiction I read. In his most recent novel, Horror Movie, Paul Tremblay interweaves scenes from a fictional screenplay with traditional prose. Brian McAuley uses the same…