…Treat every success in your fiction like it’s a clue. In other words, hide the holy shit out of it. Hide it in plain sight. Break away the second before the character succeeds, and show them after a time jump, struggling on the next thing. Show the bad guys flipping every success on its head. […]
And Important Note on Success in Fiction… Read More »
Okay, harsh truth time. Not the harshest of the harsh truths that I’ve ever laid down, but still pretty harsh. There’s a “thing” that a lot of writers go through. A LOT A LOT. I do this and have been doing this for years, although I can see the light on the far side of
Why Aren’t You Selling? Read More »
I thought of some other genres to write up like yesterday’s post about mysteries. Adventure. The main character has to do some sort of big goal that requires putting themselves at physical risk somehow. So every scene, the character should try to achieve their goal by taking a physical risk that fails to resolve the goal,
How to Write Other Stuff (if you’re me) Read More »
Someone asked me how I write mysteries. Now that I’m writing them, it seems kind of like a “well, duh” question, although I recognize that they can seem intimidating from the outside, because I, too, was intimidated before I started writing them. Mostly, mostly, you write a mystery like you write anything else, however you happen
How to Write a Mystery (if you’re me) Read More »
I recently saw what looks like good advice: “Write what you buy.” So I looked at the books that I buy. I buy: Alternate history. Literary historical fiction. Fantasy, especially grimdark. But also Terry Pratchett. Classic mysteries. Literary horror. Diverse authors. Smartass romance. James Bond novels. Pulp SF and pulp crime. Short stories!!! Some days,
Write What You Buy Read More »
I think a possible (possible!) hallmark of whether you’re on the right trail of selling your crap is the feeling that you have a magic wand. You wave it, and stuff happens–books sell. Maybe not as many books as you want to sell, and maybe you wave the wand again and the books stop selling.
Notes on Selling Crap Read More »
NaNoWriMo is going on for some people. I’m not doing it this year. I’m not feeling it, I have too much other stuff going on, and I just did the writing-thing-per-day challenge thing last month, with the October flash fiction.* But here is my 2017 advice for surviving writing 50K in a month: You do
How to Survive NaNoWriMo, 2017 Edition Read More »
Step one of selling your crap (not that it’s crap, just that you’re likely to think it must be crap when you’re trying to sell it) is to go from “I’m going to pressure my connections into buying this based on who I am” to “Tempting, isn’t it?” So: identify three things that your audience
How to Sell Your Crap, Part 0 Read More »
Most people hate most surprises most of the time. It’s only when you secretly suspect that there’s going to be a surprise, and the surprise will be exactly what you wanted but didn’t have to ask for, or what you would have wanted if you had known that it was a possibility, that a “surprise” is
Surprise! Plot twist. Read More »
Some plots are simple. Plots based on a Joseph Campbell structure are simple. Each step follows directly from the last. “Once upon a time, there was a dude who was wrong about something. He went on an epic journey to teach him humility, which made him right—and being right made him strong.” There is one
You’re Only One Bad Assumption away from an Elegant Plot Twist Read More »
