Stale Voices
Recently, I was reading a thriller by a bestselling author I’ve long been a fan of and I found a problem: the characters pretty much all sounded the same. The main character sounded an awful lot like the detective, who sounded like the corporate executive, who sounded like the author as the narrator and so […]
Once More, with Feeling!
I used to coach my daughter Danielle in acting. She’d get a casting call for a movie or television role, and we’d look at the script and try to figure out what it was that the director would want. If it was a Disney movie, they might want one style of acting, while a dramatic […]
Turning Points
In every story there are turning points, moments in time where the characters are forced into a new course of action and thus get unexpected results. Turning points may be simple or complex, mundane or magical. For example, you might have a character who is driving home from work, and he sees police cars on […]
Avoiding Clutter
Each quarter as I go through the stories for the Writers of the Future Contest, I search for patterns to problems. This quarter I saw that we had far more fantasy than ever before—particularly modern fairytales. That’s not a problem, really, just an observation. I’m seeing more really good stories than ever before, but I […]
Creating Obstacles for Your Character
Let’s say I have a young woman. Her name is Kate, and she must get to Tabith. What kinds of obstacles might she face? Here are thirteen types of obstacles. Intellectual obstacles. She might not know where Tabith is. Perhaps its location is secret, and one must first solve a mystery in order to get […]
Accepting Responsibility for Your Titles
It’s fairly common for editors to want to change titles. Sometimes a title might be too much like that of another book. For example, one of my novels had the working title of Berserker Prime. I turned it in without realizing that Fred Saberhagen had used the same title five years previous. This kind of […]
Write Now!
On Thursday, I had two young writers thank me for advice I’d given on short stories, which they had just sold. I had two more writers that I had helped discover through the Writers of the Future Contest that won Dragon Awards, so it was a great day. I love days like that. But not […]
Creating a Sense of Wonder in Your Fantasy
There are all kinds of fantasy novels. If you’re a genre writer, the first one that you might think of is Sword and Sorcery, or perhaps High Fantasy. Typically, these are fantasies set in some sort of medieval world, much like Tolkien’s, but the authors may have very distinctive voices. Yet there are lots of […]
What Rejection Really Means
For the last few weeks I’ve been scurrying to finish up judging on a large contest. I’ve had to “reject” thousands of stories. I hate the word “reject,” because it doesn’t really express what I want to say. Very often I will read the opening to a story and it is obviously the first work […]
Do What You Love
Years ago, I had a reporter call and ask, “If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?” The only answer I had was, “I’d just keep on being a writer.” Since it was Career Day, the reporter wrote an article in which he posed that question to dozens of people. As […]