This week’s video uses an example from Christine Jeffs’s Sunshine Cleaning to show how you can use your character’s job to make your story more interesting. Video Transcript: Over on Twitter, my daily #writetips have been focusing on the importance of making your protagonist’s career a conscious decision, since it can influence your story in […]
May 23, 2010 by 34 Comments DescriptionGenerality Is the Death of the Novel
Fiction is about specifics. In real life, you may get away with being ridiculously vague: “Gimme that thingamajig over there.” But the only reason this works is because the specifics are already staring both you and your listeners in the face. In fiction, however, you must hit the specifics and hit them hard. Years ago, […]
January 17, 2010 by 72 Comments Writing InspirationAre You Called to Be a Writer?
Most of us write for simple reasons: We enjoy it. It gives us personal satisfaction and fulfillment. Maybe it earns us a little money. For most of us, those reasons are good enough by themselves to justify our pouring our time and thought and effort into what is largely a metaphysical pursuit. But at one […]
August 23, 2009 by 42 Comments Writing InspirationWhy Genre Writing Could Kill Your Career
The title of this week’s post is easily a very controversial, debatable, and in some respects downright wrong statement. After all, we have only to look at the latest copy of the New York Times to see that the fiction categories in its bestseller lists are inevitably headed by established genre writers. Very obviously, genre […]
August 9, 2009 by 42 Comments CharactersYour Character’s Career: Why It May Be the Most Important Decision in Your Book
In the 1998 movie Ever After, the character Prince Henry (played by Dougray Scott) complains that “to be so defined by your position, to only be seen as what you are. You don’t know how insufferable that is!” To which Drew Barrymore’s character responds, “You might be surprised. A gypsy, for example, is rarely painted […]
