Yesterday’s post, by the way. Far be it from me to be like, “Oh, writing is easy, you can do it in these six easy steps” or “every first draft is a good first draft.” You can’t and they aren’t. Not even if you make the condition that every draft can be fixed–because that’s not […]
I’m just going to say it. Not all first drafts suck. But you’re never going to write a first draft that doesn’t suck if you believe otherwise.
A quick POV edit: In short, she thought he was lying. In short, he was probably lying. They mean the same thing. But the first one comes from outside “her” head. The second one is what “she” is more likely to think. “He’s probably lying,” she thought. Versus “I thought he was lying,” she thought.
…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.
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
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,
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
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,
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.
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
