Once again, I’d like to explore a little more of the idea that encountering an example of bad writing by someone else can actually provide an excellent opportunity to improve your own writing. (My previous discussion about this is here.) As a writer, it’s always important to read plenty, both for enjoyment (of course!) and to have a lot of examples to draw from of what sort of writing is to your taste. But when you come across something that…
I promise this is a post about writing, but first I have to start here: In the martial arts in general, and more particularly in the martial art that I practice, TaeKwonDo (TKD), there are a lot of principles students are required to learn about and encouraged to follow. Some of these are like the student oath (e.g., ‘I shall never misuse TaeKwonDo’) or the tenets (e.g., Integrity). Others are frameworks for learning and conceptualizing the core values and lessons…
Got another reminder today that the story needs to start with the most important info first. I got turned around on the one I’m working on because the setting is contemporary. But the story itself is still speculative fiction, so the spec.fic. element does still need to exist right up front. Thank goodness. I was really struggling there.
Well, once again it is the time of year when I’d like to post up how my writing progress has gone for the year. For past years, the posts are at: 2024, 2023. This year I’ve been kind of dreading putting this post together, because 2025 has not been a good writing year for me. Instead 2025 has been a lot in terms of life events, especially in the first half of the year, and that has translated on the…
I’ve just posted the final installment of my latest serialized story to this blog. And so now, for either those who’ve held off reading it yet and maybe need some enticement, or for those who just like to hear about what went into a story, I’d like to tell you a bit more about it. We’re going to do this in a quasi-interrogation format, just for fun, and also to keep things from wandering too far afield. Author Interrogations: SSCS-03…
How do you start a story? How do you end a story? These can be extremely vexing questions for any writer. But one thing anyone can remember when you hit this wall is that you were actually taught the best way to begin and end nearly any piece of writing in Middle School. Remember? Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. That, of course, sounds super-pedantic and boring, which is…
Well, once again it is the time of year when I’d like to post up how my writing progress has gone for the year (and, if you’re curious, you can compare this year’s progress update with last year’s here). Progress updates are a funny thing. They imply a need for quantifiable achievement, and it is definitely true that I do like to tabulate things, probably more than other people would consider healthy (hence, the bottom of this post with my…
I don’t really believe in ghosts. Or, more accurately, I think I believe that if ghosts exist, they do so in a way that’s just not relevant to me, that our worlds are completely separate, and that theirs does not affect mine. I’m pretty sure that’s what I believe. It can still be fun to indulge in a good ghost story on occasion. Especially around Halloween. Ghosts, and ghost stories, I think, have a way of connecting us very deeply…
So. Sometimes, reading other writers’ blogs, I’ll read about the sort of research another author might put into their story. Maybe they’ll (1) talk about traveling to a relevant city (not exactly within reach for most of us), or pouring over Google maps of a relevant city (definitely sensible – sounds like a lot of work though – so, maybe a reason to avoid contemporary settings if at all possible?). Or (2) they’ll call up or interview an expert or…
Last year, after I had finished posting all of the installments for my first SSCS (Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory),I put up a post talking about different aspects of the story and/or the writing process, in the same vein as the pieces authors sometimes do when, for example, they’re doing a blog tour to promote their new book. Now that all of the installments have been posted for my most recent SSCS, How to Catch…