Unfamiliar words
A common problem in fantasy and science fiction stories is drowning the reader in made-up words at the start of... (More...)
A common problem in fantasy and science fiction stories is drowning the reader in made-up words at the start of... (More...)
Here's something I see often in stories: The story appears to be set on modern Earth. Everyone looks and acts... (More...)
Just happened across the LJ community called little_details, which provides a place for writers to ask questions to help make... (More...)
tacityhydra just mentioned the Mo Movie Measure in passing; I was going to post this comment in response to that... (More...)
One of the things I like about some country songs is the way the choruses work. For example, there seems... (More...)
David M recently mentioned ambition and genius, among other things. I've recently finally gotten back to reading Julie P's Tiptree... (More...)
I mentioned to Mary Anne this afternoon that I pretty much can't plot (whether fiction or games) unless I'm sitting... (More...)
(Warning: this entry contains gross imagery.) We see this kind of story fairly often: First the author postulates a future... (More...)
Advice to anyone who writes anything on a computer: Say you've written the line "The men ran down the hill."... (More...)
Been seeing a fair number of submissions lately in which Something Mysterious Is Going On--and by two-thirds of the way... (More...)
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a very popular movie that had a surprise twist... (More...)
Say you've written a story in which a driver picks up a mysterious hitchhiker, and in the end there's a... (More...)
Not sure what to write next? Here's a challenge: Come up with a title that's at least seven words long... (More...)
The discussion has taken its toll, and I've decided: I'm declaring myself to be a write-in candidate for the SFWA... (More...)
As has been widely noted, on this year's Hugo ballot there's only one work by a woman among the twenty... (More...)
I've been meaning to post for months about Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's forthcoming pirate anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails, but... (More...)
During the past year, three different authors have submitted stories to us in which there were two spaces after every... (More...)
I've been asked to relay the following question to y'all writers: What would you want in the ultimate writer tool?... (More...)
I read some romance recently--a Crusie novel (reissue) I hadn't previously encountered, and then a set of three novellas by... (More...)
In the past few days, I keep coming across various items of advice and commentary about writing. (The focus here... (More...)
Some notes on point-of-view handling in works by three authors: One idiosyncrasy of H. Beam Piper's writing, at least in the... (More...)
I'm pretty sure most of y'all regular readers know this, but I figure it can't hurt to say it again... (More...)
It seems like a bunch of stuff related to reusing material has been coming up lately. For example, various people... (More...)
More and more, lately, it seems like I have both happy and sad things to post about on the same... (More...)
I just found out about Duotrope's Digest, a site that's a combined market list and submission tracking system. (It's been... (More...)
Say you're a writer, and you want to submit to a magazine. Say you've actually read their submission guidelines, but there was something in them that you think the editors can't possibly have meant. (More...)
It's fairly common in science fiction these days to see sentient beings in electronic form--whether artificial intelligences or uploaded human... (More...)
Congratulations are in order to: Mary Anne, who's going to teach at Clarion next year! Tim, who sold two novels... (More...)
Shira Tarrant is editing an anthology of essays titled Men Speak Out: ProFeminist Views on Gender, Sex and Power; below... (More...)
Belated happy Mother's Day to all of the mothers reading this! I'm always impressed by y'all. And, more generally, yay... (More...)
There's a trope I like a lot in fiction when it's done well: characters who are so ardent in their... (More...)
"And now," Dr. Zurückgeschichte said, "please explain to me how an infodump works." "But why would I have to explain... (More...)
I was on my way to sleep, but I just remembered to mention a recent event, and if I don't... (More...)
I've been seeing this a fair bit lately: cover letters in which authors explain that they haven't been published, but... (More...)
Some thoughts on plausibility and genre conventions. (More...)
There continues to be tremendous confusion among some SH submitters over the distinction between curved (or slanted) quotation marks and... (More...)
Some items that may or may not add up to more than the sum of their parts: Okay, so there's... (More...)
Something I see quite often in both submissions and published fiction (including movies) is plots that hinge on people taking... (More...)
I'm still not awake enough to post a more substantive entry, but as I was on my way to bed... (More...)
I've had occasion recently to see a couple of authors' word-processor documents, and I've noticed that some authors are using... (More...)
I'm continuing to re-read the Narnia books. Will have more to say about that sooner or later, but for now,... (More...)
A couple of notes on fanfic: Kathleen on Why fanfic? And why Final Fantasy fanfic in particular? First chapter of... (More...)
Peter S. Beagle will be reading tonight in San Francisco, at the Make-Out Room, as part of Charlie Anders's "Writers... (More...)
About halfway through reading the Slate article "Star Wars: Episodes I-VI: The greatest postmodern art film ever," by Aidan Wasley,... (More...)
Here's another piece of advice for writers. (Or anyone else, but writers are who I see doing this.) When you're... (More...)
This occurred to me, more or less irrelevantly, while I was reading a story in Asimov's recently: Fiction is often... (More...)
A conversation with a certain neopro author (hope you don't mind that characterization) at WisCon made me think there ought... (More...)
I was in a bookstore the other evening; bought a recently published first novel by someone who I think is... (More...)
Some things that've made me happy lately: At World Fantasy Con this past weekend, half a dozen people I didn't... (More...)
Just once, I'd like to see a story in which there's a planet-wide network of interlinked computational elements and/or life... (More...)
I see no reason not to use a journal as, among other things, a commonplace book. So I'll quote two... (More...)
Friday through Sunday, we discussed various aspects of the craft of writing, critiqued stories, ate well (thanks largely to Mary... (More...)