Discrimination in the Writing World
A few days ago, I saw a Facebook post from a woman who complained that she didn’t want to see panels by “boring, old, white, cisgender men” at the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention. Now, I’ve always fought against discrimination based on age, race, sexual orientation, and gender, so I was kind of surprised that […]
Tightening Your Focus
When you’re writing a tale, it almost always turns out better if you get deep into the head of your protagonist and tell the story from that person’s point of view. This is especially true if you have multiple protagonists, because it means that you will need to characterize those people by showing just how […]
When You Write a Dull Scene…
Have you ever found that you’re reading a book and suddenly your eyes glaze over? Have you asked yourself what is wrong? Very often, if I stop right there, I’ll find a problem. Here are some questions that I ask myself as I try to figure out what is wrong. 1) Is this scene […]
Writing Perfect Prose
Have you ever heard Churchill’s saying, “Perfection is the enemy to progress”? As a writer, I suspect that you know what I mean. Sometimes I see writers slave over a story in an effort to make it “perfect,” but in doing so they spend so much time that they inevitably slow their production level down […]
Move Your Story Forward
Stories should move forward, not backward. This might seem like a pretty basic idea, but sometimes a writer feels “stalled” on a novel. For example, I have a novel that I looked at this week that had no less than three “Prologues,” which the author was thinking of spreading throughout the novel. Each was nicely […]
Discoverability
Twenty years ago, I was writing little Star Wars books for Scholastic when my editor, David Levithan, asked if I would be willing to look at some books and help choose one to push big. So I looked at about 40 books and chose one called Harry Potter. Afterward, I spoke with the head of […]
Writing Emotions
I’m not sure, but I suspect that writers and other artists tend to be emotionally volatile. In part, I believe that we create in order to try to express ourselves using heightened communication—our art. Yet there is a danger in trying too hard to express emotions. Let me explain. . . . If you look […]
Branding Yourself
It’s always good before you begin to write to really understand who your audience is and what their needs are, so that you can better meet those needs. But it’s also important to understand who you are as an author, and what it is that you want to achieve. Once I was helping an […]
Why Movie Producers Don’t Read
Three weeks ago I was talking to a movie producer in Hollywood that is trying to set up a couple of movie and television deals for me. He was explaining how nobody in Hollywood will read a book. It’s a common complaint, and there are good reasons for it—or at least I’ve heard rumors that […]
Writing Easy, Writing Hard
One of my Facebook friends today put up a message that said, “Fewer people would take up writing if they knew just how hard it really is.” She’s right. Writing does look simple, and in fact, when you first start out, very often it is. I have a saying, “Writing is easy, but writing beautifully […]