Nothing creates suspense and fear like a potent, evil, will-take- prisoners villain. A good villain is the stuff of nightmares and will haunt the reader long after the story concludes. The best villains create genuine feelings of vulnerability in characters and readers. As in make your blood run cold. Here’s a round-up of tips for […]
Read the rest of this entry »Author Archive
Villains: Color them Dark and Dastardly, part 1
A liver-eating, Chianti-drinking cannibal.Let the games begin!
Read the rest of this entry »Fiction is about the most interesting events in your protagonist’s life
If your story is not the most dramatic, intense, and difficult circumstances in your protagonist’s life, why then are you writing it?
Read the rest of this entry »Quick Take: Plan for Turbulence
Beginning fiction writers I’ll make this quick: In fiction characters do not get along most of the time. Tension comes from fractious relationships, power struggles, disagreements, love or hate or longing that cannot be expressed. Plan your stories for turbulence, not sweetness. Fiction is a world of unease. I told you I’d be quick.
Read the rest of this entry »Advice from the brilliant Margaret Atwood
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood […]
Read the rest of this entry »Write first drafts on paper…
nothing approaches the uncluttered nondigital quiet of a page.
Read the rest of this entry »Quick take: Skip the “took a”
Like many editors I’ve collected my own gaggle of words and phrases that I find annoying. I can become curmudgeonly if I spot certain words in a manuscript, especially when they’re abused and appear over and over. Now, I realize that taste and preference are highly subjective and chances are I might stand alone on […]
Read the rest of this entry »“As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a […]
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