Category: Writing Tips


When I was 22, I logged into a Forgotten Realms forum called Candlekeep to find that no less a personage than Ed Greenwood — the prolific creator of the setting that WotC murdered — had read the backstory I posted about a character I was going to play in a then-upcoming game and declared it publishable (if only it were in an original setting). He described it as a good, fun read, then added “More, please!”

That was my first compliment from a “real” author. Still stunned, I told my mother about it and she was a little hurt. “I’ve been telling you your writing was good for years!”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but you’re my mom.”

Your mom is supposed to like your stuff. She doted on your colorful scribbles when you were five, too. Even if she’s a successful writer who’s known for critical taste, she’s still biased where you’re concerned. And that’s fine. She should be.

Well, AI doesn’t love you, but it’s almost like it’s programmed to act like it. You have to actively work at it to make it critical of your work in the right way. I recently went on The Novel Marketing Podcast to talk about why — and how to fix it.

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Four Rules of Using AI

I am a big proponent of using AI to help speed up the grunt work of, well, any task; but this blog is about writing, so we’re going to talk about AI in writing. Specifically, I want to talk about four guiding principles that will help you use AI as an author with more effectiveness and without losing your voice.

But, since I am also a big proponent of establishing definitions, let’s look at what we’re actually talking about. What is AI, and what is an LLM?


Defining AI

This is an issue because there’s what’s actually AI, and there’s what’s marketed as AI. When AI began to be perceived as a magic button for customer involvement and investment, a lot of things we’ve already accepted as normal technology got redefined as “AI” so it could sound new and amazing. That includes simple things like Photoshop tools or Word’s grammar check.

That’s led to confusion with the way the Butlarian Jihad hunts down AI-using heretics. (If you don’t recognize the term, it’s from the Dune setting and references a movement to ban AI. It’s becoming the standard way to refer to the rabidly anti-AI crowd today.) When everything is AI, it’s really easy to justify cancelling someone for using it in a way that the Butlerians don’t like, or when they just don’t like the user. But that also means that it’s incredibly hard to escape AI, because these days everything is AI — or at least marketed as such.

So defining AI in a way that matters to normal people is important. Of course, most normal people would fall asleep just listening to a real definition of AI and LLMs. Allow me to demonstrate.

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Spend enough time in sci-fi fandom and you’ll eventually be expected to take a side: is Star Wars science fiction or space fantasy?

The usual argument against including Star Wars in the hallowed halls of science fiction is “because space wizards.” However, then we have to define what “space wizardry” really is, because there’s nothing that the Jedi do that can’t be framed as ESP or psychic powers in other settings that don’t get this kind of pushback. And if we’re going to disqualify any story with vaguely-defined psychic powers, then we’ll also need to remove Star Trek, Dune, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and more.

The less-common, but still notable, objection is that it just doesn’t depend on science fiction tropes. It has spaceships and robots and other planets, but they aren’t central to the plot the way the starships of Star Trek or the titular space station of Babylon 5 are. That centrality is instead given to “space wizardry.” But, in addition to bringing us back to the question of how much ESP is too much for sci-fi, this argument overlooks the opposite issue: does putting a spaceship in a dragon-rider setting make the spaceship fantasy? Or does it make the dragons some form of science?

As you might guess, I have some thoughts on this topic, enough for more than one blog post. I’m going to go through the arguments as I see them, look at the development of the genre, offer my own definition, and even spend time on the question of soft versus hard science fiction. But, first, there’s an even more important question: why should we even care?

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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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