Archive for the 'On Writing: Craft' Category
A pamphlet on writing?
May 13th 2008 at 12:28 pm
I’ve been noticing that my most popular blog entries are writing advice related, and I’ve been blathering away here for, well, years. While watching TV of late I’ve been browsing my archives during commercials and copy/pasting any interesting nuggets into a file to collate and capture all the thoughts and writing advice into one big […]
Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing
May 2nd 2008 at 2:21 pm
The latest podcast of Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing is up, it includes me talking about how to start writing again after a long period of downtime.
Also on the show, an interview with David Keck, and Lou Anders talks about whether short fiction is dead or not.
Trunking stories and genre splits
April 9th 2008 at 1:01 pm
From my ‘ask me a question‘ entry, I finally get around to answering the two last questions in the queue:
James asks:
When do you retire (or trunk) a short story? I’m staring at my list of stories, and only a few of them I think are good. Should I trust my own instinct, or maybe I’m […]
How I write a novel… revisited
April 7th 2008 at 7:26 am
One of the more popular items on my website is the article ‘how I write a novel.’ It was written in September of 2006. Plus, in my ‘Ask an question’ thread back from January/February this question was asked again. I was working my way down the questions and ran out of time to put this […]
Writing a series
April 7th 2008 at 5:51 am
Carrie Vaughn says very intelligent things about creating a series here, which isn’t surprising, because she’s a very intelligent person:
When I realized Kitty was turning into a series, I thought long and hard about this question. I had some examples of good series to study — and I had some examples of series that had […]
Novel Synopsis Project
March 18th 2008 at 4:59 am
All these authors are posting links to novel synopsis all one one day all at the same time (with thanks for Joshua Palmatier for organizing):
Patricia Bray: http://www.sff.net/people/patriciabray/synopsis.html
Chaz Brenchley: http://desperance.livejournal.com
Mike Brotherton: http://www.mikebrotherton.com
Tobias Buckell: Crystal Rain
S.C. Butler: http://scbutler.livejournal.com
Barbara Campbell: www.barbara-campbell.com/inside.htm
David B. Coe: http://davidbcoe.livejournal.com
Jennifer Dunne: http://jennifer_dunne.livejournal.com
S.L. Farrell: http://sleigh.livejournal.com
Diana […]
Ask me a question: differing techniques
January 31st 2008 at 3:35 pm
Doug Triplett asked in my ‘ask a question‘ comment thread:
Since you teach writing also, what is different about the techniques you try to get your students to use as compared to your own style of creating stories?
I don’t formally teach writing so much as act as a mentor to students who are writing. When I […]
Rewriting
January 3rd 2008 at 4:19 pm
Justine Larbalestier says all sorts of really intelligent things about rewriting on her blog:
There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. Most beginner writers get caught up in sentence level changes. They go over their manuscripts deleting and switching words around (what’s called line editing in the biz). They do this before […]
What is work?
December 18th 2007 at 1:07 pm
Over at SF Novelists Kate Elliot has a great blog entry about what work is for a writer:
…much of the work I do doesn’t necessarily look like work.
For instance:
Undirected daydreaming.
Many of my ideas for novels have emerged out of undirected daydreaming. Without it, I would have much less to write; maybe I would have nothing […]
Hawala
December 4th 2007 at 9:50 am
This is going in book 4. Somehow.
Hawala is a money-transfer system based primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, based on independent brokers who phone one another and say, “I’m holding so much money in such and such a currency, please transfer an equivalent sum in local funds to such and such a person.” […]
