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 […]
The Headlines are Only Half the Story
You may have heard about the Silk Road scandal in Time magazine, Wired magazine, or any of a hundred other places. Curtis Green took a job working for a company called Silk Road, where (unknown to Curtis) his boss, nicknamed “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was trafficking drugs over the internet. When the FBI and the DEA […]
Writing a Bestselling Series, Chapter 16: Finishing the Series
When I opened the Runelords series, I knew that I didn’t want one of those endless book series that just kept stringing the reader along—something like Tarzan 28, or Sherlock Holmes 15. I mean, there are characters that I love, but I just can’t stay interested in a character after he has grown through […]
Writing a Bestselling Series, Chapter 15: On Molding New Writers
When you’re a writer, there are a lot of jobs in the field that are somewhat related. I’ve worked on videogames and movies, edited computer manuals, helped write proposals, written a little nonfiction, and so on. Certainly one of the most common careers is teaching. Now, when I was in college I put a lot […]
Be Precise
When you’re telling a story, they say that “God is in the details.” In other words, the more details you feed your reader, the easier it is for that reader to enter your fictive universe and become engrossed in your universe. Too often, writers throw out abstract details and expect the reader to fill in […]
Writing a Bestselling Series, Chapter 14: Choosing my Covers
In 1998 and 1999, I found myself in an odd place. I had advised one of my publishers to push Harry Potter big, and I was filled with anticipation about that. I was writing little Star Wars game books as fast I could, and I was invited to write a novel based upon an old […]
Get Writers of the Future for $.99
Dear folks, Just wanted to post a little note to say that Amazon has this year’s Writers of the Future anthology on sale for only $.99 cents, and I also wanted to share a nice review it got recently from Publishers Weekly: ***
Writing a Bestselling Series, Chapter 13: Strange Reviews
Most writers kill their own careers. For decades now I’ve studied promising new writers, and sometimes after a writer makes a great debut, a few years later I wonder, “Where did so-and-so go?” Many authors will start great but then quit the race. The most common mistake that a new author makes is that the […]
Creating a Sense of Wonder in 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 […]
Accepting Responsibility for Your Writing Career
Like many of you, when I began writing I started a couple of novels but soon discovered that there was a lot more to writing than I had anticipated. I got a few chapters into each of them and had to stop for one reason only: I didn’t know what to write next. Over the next […]