Writer
One of my bestest writing buddies, Ashley Capes (a beta reader for Chaos, and a fantastic writer & poet) has a post on his blog titled Suggestiveness and Clarity in Poetry. I’m a big proponent of studying poetry, even if you’re strictly a prose writer (as I am). Even if you’re not going for poetic prose, poetry can teach you some fantastic wordsmithing …
Last September I joined Scribophile, an online writing community that specializes in peer review and critique. So here it is, almost a year later, and I thought I’d do a little update to the Scribophile review I posted then. At the moment, I’ve got the first twelve scenes of my current project up on Scrib, with a total of 63 …
This is a post about writing, I promise. Since I write fantasy, I know a lot about killing tension. Fantasy and other spec-fic writers have a ton of information and backstory to convey, and more often than not this results in the story coming to a screeching halt. Epic fantasy, in particular, tends toward long, drawn-out ‘saggy bits’ that can …
I’ve been a member of www.fantasy-writers.org for a long time, but recently I signed up for another writing site, Scribophile. The community of writers there is much larger, and not so tightly focused (all genres are represented there). So far I’ve been really enjoying it.
I came across Miss Snark’s blog years ago, and it’s been one of my favorites ever since. The very aptly named Miss Snark describes her occupation as “Satan’s literary agent”. Her blog provides an immense amount of information on the publishing industry, delivered in such a hilarious, scathing voice that her anonymity is a wise career move. Miss Snark closed …
Left to my own devices, I tend to be a by-the-seat-of-my-pants sort of writer. More often than not, this gets me into trouble–not only do I end up meandering all over the place, it’s hard to finish things, and it makes writer’s block a true dead end. When I stalled out on my current novel project, I read a book …
I don’t care what they’ve told you–you can’t show everything. Some things you need to tell. Exposition is necessary, especially for spec-fic writers who can’t rely on their readers to already be familiar with the story’s setting. The trouble for me comes when I’m trying to figure out what information is necessary, and how to communicate it without breaking the …