It annoys me when people say “you have to believe in yourself!” Do you? Do you really? I think of the people I’ve met who really believed in themselves. There’d be one in every writing class. They’d submit some unreadable, meandering block of prose with no plot, no characters, and Read more
Some of my most successful stories have been the easiest to write. “Butterflies on Barbed Wire” was practically a single draft and sold to like the third market I sent it to. Why? Well, it plays to my strengths – I wrote about characters I could relate to in situations Read more
I’m working on this story and one of the first readers said that I needed to “Show the main character making his decision.” So I re-wrote it and I added all this internal dialog for the character waffling over his decision and… I realized I don’t know how to show Read more
At Clarion, one of our instructors (I think it was a guest lecture from Kim Stanley Robinson) said, “The change to your writing won’t come right away. For most it’s two years after Clarion that what you learn here will really change your writing.” The message was, “Don’t expect to Read more
The first critiques we receive always stay with us the longest and hold disproportionate position in our imaginations. So it is for me and scientific plausibility. As a child, writing silly, childish stories, I was drawn to science fiction first. I wanted to write about robots and spaceships and aliens. Read more
I’ve written before about how genre is a set of expectations. Those expectations can be set for the reader when they see the author’s name, or when they enter a certain section of the bookstore, or see the cover art. Titles, back cover copy, the first sentence – all of Read more
Well, I did it! I wrote 50 new short story drafts in 42 days. I started strong, zipping out some flashy flash pieces, and I slogged and hit writer’s block and I did sorta take four days out to revise a novel because that’s the kind of crazy I am. Read more