When I was still unpublished, I spent a lot of time worrying about My First Line and Hooking The Reader. If my very first line didn’t grab the reader by the throat and make them incapable of doing anything other than reading on, how would I ever break in?? This… Read more…
PLOT is not ACTION. It can be easy to confuse the two. I sure have. I’ve heard great and award-winning authors summarize their view of plot as, “The stuff that happens.” Well, yes… a successful plot is the stuff that happens, but stuff happening is not, in itself, plot. I Read more…
“When do you stop revising?” A friend asked me recently. “You can stop?” was my initial response, but the truth is more nuanced than that. (And besides, that answer was Not Helpful.) At some point in my writing career – I’m going to say it was two laptops ago so Read more…
I recently volunteered to be a first-round reader at a fiction magazine. A “slush reader.” I think referring to the mountain of submitted stories as “the slush” started when paper submissions were slipped through the transoms of publishing offices, resulting in a slippery pile of envelopes the employees had to Read more…
In writing workshops, sometimes you find yourself with nothing to say about a particular story. It’s either so not your thing you don’t know how to improve it, or it’s just plain good already. The dangerous temptation is to come up with something to say, anyway, something minor or weird, Read more…
On Saturday, November 10, I attended a sweet workshop at Case Western Reserve University’s Writing Center. The presenter was Linda Robertson, and the topic was “Speculative Fiction: From Concept to Pitch.” Attendees were asked to submit a brief (one page) story concept, and in addition to taking us through the Read more…
Why do we need plot anyway, the stupid thing!? Why does it think it’s so important, instead of, say, character or really delicious scene description? These are the question newbie-me asked many times, when I was so good at dialog and character and scenes but I just hadn’t figured out Read more…