Category: Writing Tips


The Human Limitations of Arms and Armor

Filed under: History, Research — 3 Comments
April 1, 2024

When I was a child, about 11 or 12, I was unfortunately subjected to a purported film known by the alias Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which claims to be a retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. I’ve encountered more historical accuracy from 20-minute children’s cartoons, and I knew hardly anything about the history of the medieval Catholic Church at the time, so that’s saying something. (Though I should add that I was living in Italy at the time, not that far from Assisi, and St. Francis was and probably still is very popular there.)

The film was pretty much a retelling with a focus on a message more appropriate to the 1960s than the 13th century. Seriously, there are so many details it got wrong, and I doubt by sincere error, that any time I’m reminded of it I get a migraine. But today I shall embrace that pain, because one error in particular stands out as an example of today’s topic.

As a young man, St. Francis participated in a battle where he was captured and had a life-altering spiritual awakening. This is depicted in the film in such a way that I suspect the director intended the audience to be on drugs, but it’s accurate in broad strokes . . . very broad strokes. Yet even as a pre-teen, the armor the young Francesco wore drove me to distraction. It’s not just that it’s not accurate 12th-century Italian armor; at that age, I couldn’t have told you what was accurate, after all. It was that I immediately saw it was inaccurate because of the human factor.

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Interview with Steve Diamond

Filed under: Editing, Motivation — 1 Comment
March 29, 2024

This blog gives my perspective as an editor, but for once I had the chance to get someone else’s perspective. This week, I was able to ask Steve Diamond, author of Residue and Parasite (among others I haven’t yet reviewed) about his writing career, the nature of horror, and some advice on rewrites.

For those who don’t know him as the popular writing podcast the WriterDojo, Steve Diamond is an accountant, a former professional reviewer and bookseller, publisher of special editions, brisket connoisseur, and sworn enemy of the eldritch selachimorphs that have lurked in the depths of the oceans for millions of years. In fact, he goes into the latter in the excellent early episode of the above-mentioned podcast, Season One, Episode Twelve, “Horror” — an episode quite relevant to today’s post! If you’ve never listened to it, go ahead. This post will still be here when you get back.

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Novel Ninja: How would you describe yourself as an author?

Steve Diamond: Man, that’s a tough one. I think I try to be an entertainer. I’m not that guy that agonizes over every sentence. I don’t think I’ll ever be the guy that people call “literary,” and that’s fine by me. My only goal is to entertain… to have loftier goals than that feels hyper selfish and prideful to me.

Now after the entertainment factor, I’d say I’m rather mercenary. I’ll write whatever I’m paid to write. Maybe that’s straight-up Lovecraftian fiction, a Winnie the Pooh story (thanks public domain!), giant robots, or even a spy-thriller. I’ll write whatever I’m asked (and paid) to write. The great thing about this method is that I get to write all sorts of different things, and that keeps my stories fresh. It also helps me practice, which I think shows in my fiction.

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Near-Future Sci-Fi Just Got Easier

Filed under: Science, Science Fiction, Worldbuilding — 3 Comments
March 22, 2024

There’s a joke in science fiction writing communities that the advancement of science and technology makes science fiction harder. It’s a joke because SF is a genre that depends on the advancement of science and technology; but it’s also a joke because it’s kinda true. When your job is to describe the future, advancements can make it harder when fantastic things become more commonplace or turn out to be completely disproven. This can be glossed over sometimes — and in fact, many great science fiction stories depend on things both the authors and the audience know to be impossible — but for the most part good SF depends on staying both ahead of and within scientific understanding.

Sometimes, though, there’s an advancement that makes a big splash that makes it easier, not harder. Sometimes you don’t have to be more creative than the real world in order to stay ahead of it, simply because it opens up so many more possibilities than you’d had before. Creativity doesn’t lie in being completely new, but rather in recombining things in the real world.

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The Emotional Thesaurus: A Must-Have for Any Fiction Author

Filed under: Book Reviews, Recommended Reading, Wordsmithing — Leave a comment
March 15, 2024

Lately, I’ve been running into authors who don’t know about this book, much less its ‘sequels,’ and it’s more than worth doing a quick post on the topic. I can state without any reservation that if you do not have a copy of The Emotional Thesaurus, you are cheating yourself. There is no other single book that you can buy that will help your writing more; and yes, that includes that other book you were just thinking of, whatever it was.

The Emotional Thesaurus is a book that does exactly what it sounds like, only more so. It gives you synonyms for different emotional states, which by itself is extraordinarily useful. How many times have you had to stop to figure out how to describe what a character was feeling? But it goes far, far deeper, giving you body language, internal effects, and behavior associated with each emotion.

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Writing Maxim #2: Fiction Has to Make Sense

Filed under: Characters, Plots — Leave a comment
March 11, 2024

As I mentioned before, I have a few phrases of advice regarding creative writing that I repeat often enough to dub them maxims. This time, I want to look at the concept that real life has an advantage over fiction: fiction has to make sense.

This is hardly an original observation of mine, of course; Mark Twain wrote the first known version of this line (“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t”), though I’m rather more fond of G. K. Chesterton’s version (“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction […] For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it”).

The principle here is that reality can be random, but fiction has to have structure. We strive to make fiction as realistic as we can, but the human mind tends to rebel at a story with too much chaos. Perhaps it’s as simple as a recognition that if humans build something, it should be built with purpose and design, and so something that feels too realistic in this way feels as though the writer was careless.

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The Four Aspects of a Good Prologue

Filed under: Wordsmithing — Leave a comment
March 8, 2024

One of the most common questions I get from new authors is whether using a prologue is a good choice for a particular novel. The short answer is that it depends, but probably not.

That’s not to say that prologues can’t be good; actually, some of my favorite books have prologues, and some even benefit from them. However, I usually steer authors — especially new and upcoming authors — away from using prologues, because generally they don’t add anything to the story that the reader will appreciate. I suspect the main reason why prologues are so attractive is that many of the best books out there, the ones that shaped our perception of good stories, use prologues. Some of them even benefited from it.

Unfortunately, prologues have a reputation as extended infodumps, and because of that most readers will normally skip over a prologue. Thanks to that, a prologue typically serves as a bad introduction to your story. There are, however, some ways to judge whether your prologue can stand on its own.

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YouTube Educators Who are Better than Hollywood Movies

Filed under: History, Research, Science, Tools and Techniques — 2 Comments
July 17, 2023

Unless you’re so far under a rock that you’re not even reading this blog in the first place, you’ve heard that a double strike of writers and actors has resulted in the effective shutdown of the movie and TV industry in the United States. This of course affects more than just writers and actors, as well as more than just US citizens; lots of people other than actors and writers work in these industries, and a staggering number of people will be indirectly affected by the lack of production in the meantime. (For an idea of how interconnected everything is, I suggest reading the famous essay, “I, Pencil.”)

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Writing Maxim #1: Writing is an Art, Not a Science

Filed under: Commentary, Editing, Motivation — 1 Comment
May 9, 2023

Over the years, I’ve found myself repeating a few phrases over and over to authors of all levels, including clients, students, and lecture attendees. I eventually started calling them my maxims, and it’s high time I laid them out on my own site. After all, much of the reason for my blog updates is to give me a handy place to put stuff I already repeat a lot, so I can just link people to the post and save time in the future.

Today, it’s Writing is an art, not a science. Kind of obvious, since we call it a creative art rather than a scientific field, but it’s good to really think about what that means — especially authors worried about learning how to “do it right” or violating some kind of rule.

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Using ChatGPT for Your Fiction, Part 3: Idea Winnowing

Filed under: Characters, Tools and Techniques, Worldbuilding — Leave a comment
May 1, 2023

I got wiped out by illness last week, but a large number of you wanted another post on ChatGPT, specifically on the ‘idea winnowing’ I mentioned in my last post. (And if you missed the first post, explaining what ChatGPT is and how it works, click this shiny and well-crafted link.)

Just to recap: you’ll see a lot of people referencing ChatGPT as a tool for idea generation. That’s using it the wrong way. Ideas are a dime a dozen. You already have too many of them buzzing around your head; that’s why you feel like you can’t come up with anything, because nothing is standing out. Instead, ChatGPT can be used to winnow that mess down to something manageable.

We do this just as we would without ChatGPT: by focusing on some sort of starting point. That can be something generic, or even starting by rejecting something specific — or both. Try phrasing something as “I want X, but not Y.” For example, “I want a genius scientist character, but I don’t want someone socially inept.” If you were bouncing that off of a friend, he or she might say, “Like Tony Stark?” which then gives you an opportunity to narrow it down, such as by saying “Yes, but not arrogant. Charming, but not full of himself” or maybe “No, more like someone Robin Williams might have played. A joker who doesn’t seem to take things seriously, but actually does.” That’s how idea winnowing works. Like putting together a puzzle, you start with an edge and then explore around to find pieces that can fit.

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Should You Try to Get Your Books in Libraries and Local Stores?

Filed under: Industry, Publishing — 4 Comments
April 27, 2023

Congratulations, you’re published! But how can you get your books on shelves where people can see them?

Maybe you lucked out and got published with a house that has a distributor agreement; but that’s not going to get you in all stores or libraries, especially if the person in charge of ordering doesn’t know you exist. They don’t order three copies of everything, after all — or even just one. So is it worth it to talk to stores and libraries?

The short version is, yes, it is. The worst they can do is say no.

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