Character Arcs to Warm the Heart
You could chalk it up to nostalgia: Re-watching a childhood classic to remember a loved one or a Christmas past. But often, I find turning to classic Christmas movies can be a way for me, my family and friends to…
Category: Craft Discussion
Exploring Character Through Memoir
Fiction readers expect more of characters than they do of people in real life. In life you can have a person who does inexplicable self-destructive or transgressive shit, and friends and colleagues just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that’s…
Interview with October ’17 Craft on Draft Contest Winner: Charlotte Gross
October’s Craft on Draft reading event asked the question every writer wants on their reader’s mind. “What happens next?” Authors Kelly J. Ford (Cottonmouths), Stephanie Gayle (Idyll Fears) and Crystal King (Feast of Sorrow) read from their novels and shared…
Of Poetry, Sounding Good and Being Useful
I took a course called Technical Writing in grad school. The professor assigned a short manual that he had written himself as the required reading. He spent a lot of the time talking about the precision of language required to…
World Building: Where Are We? Part II
So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…
Lessons learned when writing under strict time constraints, or NaNoWriMo!
I’m a writer who loves a constraint. It is much easier to write when given a limiting factor than to write “anything, anything at all!” This year, I need to write 50,000 words by the end of the month. Wait,…