From The First Draft To The Last, Part 1

December 1, 2011

And so it came to pass, this past Thanksgiving Day, that reader Turenn asked, “How about a post explaining what you do between your first draft of a story and your last? I would find it helpful, and I think a lot of other writers would, too.” How about two posts, then? Because (A) I [...]

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Bring The Lightning, With The Food Of The Gods You Probably Thought Was A Joke

November 22, 2011

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re in the middle of an expedition through some of the most remote and unforgiving country on the planet. Specifically, the Copper Canyons in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. By late afternoon, under a pulverizing sun, you’re done in. You’re toast. Hungry, thirsty, barely able to put one foot in front [...]

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Go Farther, Faster, By Limiting Your View To Three Steps Ahead

November 12, 2011

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged] “Begin with the end in mind…” Sound advice, that. Sound strategy. The rationale being that if you don’t know where you’re going, how in the name of Zeus can you be sure you’ll actually get there? Where, exactly? The end of an as-yet-unfinished novel comes to mind, for starters, but that’s [...]

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A Better Way Of Managing Your Author Website

November 7, 2011

From homicidal urges to gratitude — what a difference a month or two can make. Awhile back, this blog was hacked, defaced, and generally uglifed. My fault, most likely. I hadn’t updated the foundational software, WordPress, since I’d first installed it a year-and-a-half ago. This was just begging for trouble. There was probably a security [...]

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8 Ways To Be (Artistically) Out Of Step With The Times

October 9, 2011

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged] There are a lot of places where I and everything else in sight don’t make for a comfortable fit. Where the drummer has one rhythm going and my feet twitch to some other cadence entirely. Most people will eventually cop to the same. Once we drop our pretenses, we’re all a [...]

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To Be, Or Not To Be, A Writer Of Short Fiction

September 16, 2011

It’s one of the more common dilemmas that beginning writers seem to wrestle with. I’ve heard the question enough: Should I work on short stories, or should I just jump headfirst into a novel? When it’s phrased like this, it implies that short fiction isn’t the endgame. If it were, there’s no quandary. Nobody sweats [...]

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We Now Return You To Our Irregularly Scheduled Blog

September 13, 2011

They say it happens to most bloggers sooner or later: their site gets hacked. As happened here. My apologies to you if you visited in the past week and found yourself looking at a pointless, chickenshit message slapped up by some gnat from a third-world pesthole. It took a few days to discover this. A [...]

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Sympathy For The Devils: How To Make Disagreeable Characters Agreeable

August 9, 2011

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged] It happens to all of us: A work is rejected or critically thrashed on the grounds that the main character isn’t sympathetic enough. Maybe the entire disagreeable herd of them aren’t sympathetic enough. Of course it’s a highly subjective complaint, and maybe even misses the mark for what makes a work [...]

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The 5-Second Trick To Writing More Each Week

August 5, 2011

A year-and-a-half ago I ran face-first into the buzz-saw of my own semi-distant past. It was one of those moments that leaves you feeling as if you’ve morphed into some awful version of yourself you always dreaded. I did a blog post about it, “Scaling The Rat Hole,” and of course I recommend reading the [...]

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The Power Of Gratitude, And The Reason You Might Never Have Realized It’s Vital For Writers

July 9, 2011

[Cross-post from Storytellers Unplugged] At almost every level, except maybe the upper echelons of bestsellerdom, writers seeking to establish professional relationships face a signal-to-noise ratio so lopsided it’s like pitting a mouse against an elephant. Guess which critter the writer is. The only way to cut through the noise and make yourself stand out is [...]

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The Writer’s Soul: Built One Crack At A Time

June 16, 2011

I don’t feel like writing right now. I haven’t for a while. I can’t keep letting it slide here, but really, there’s only one thing on my heart. Thus the dilemma. When you strive to write from the heart, and it feels exhausted, what then? There are people who can do this. One best-selling writer [...]

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Laughing Last: Shaking Off The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Criticism

May 9, 2011

[Cross-post from Storytellers Unplugged] Unless you put your work away where nobody else can see it, writing is an act of risk. People might not get it. People might not get you. The work may not fit present needs. And that’s just the submission part. Publication magnifies all that exponentially … and worse, does so [...]

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By Request: A Tour Of My Workspace

May 3, 2011

I forget there’s a good reason why MTV Cribs and all those other shows taking viewers into people’s homes are so popular: We’re a curious species. We love to see how other people live and work and commit ghastly crimes of taste. So it came to pass, then, that reader FZA asked: Can you describe [...]

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The New Book: A Nuts-And-Bolts Look Behind The Scenes

April 21, 2011

I’ve always loved endnotes for short fiction. I would guess that most writers do. We have a fascination with the process of creation that goes above and beyond that of most readers, the same way guitarists ask Keith Richards, “How’d you come up with that riff?” and photographers obsessively analyze the lighting in an Ansel [...]

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