I’ve spent the better part of the decade reading all the craft books I can. I don’t know everything there is to know about writing, I don’t think anyone really does. Writing (and art, in general) is too personal for that, too dependent on the individual. But I’ve gotten to a point where most “writing […]
There’s a flow to writing. For most of us, it takes a few minutes to truly get into our writing state. A few minutes before the words come easily. With enough practice it gets a little quicker to achieve this flow, but for most of us mortals, it takes a few minutes to get the […]
I rewrote the description for A Battleaxe and a Metal Arm. Why? Well, the idea evolved. The original kernel for the serial was little more than a sorceress and a barbarian trapped in an ever-changing dungeon. Sure, I had the big ideas figured out—namely the ending and the big reveals about the dungeon and the […]
It can be strange to discuss the “mechanics” of a story. Main characters, side plots, motivations, arcs, tropes, plot devices… It almost seems taboo to break a story down into building blocks. It can seem too simplistic. To me, that’s one of the neat things about storytelling, that even using a similar set of blocks […]
In the spirit of the bazillions of other January motivational posts… What’s your mountain? As a reader, it can be daunting to start a series. Sometimes the pile of books is so heavy it’s hard to carry the whole stack at one time. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not a fast reader; […]
Life is filled with small revelations. I say small, because the truly grand, life changing ones are almost never experienced or digested in a single afternoon. The truly big revelations are always composed of several smaller ones. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about time. I’ve always liked the metaphor of time as a river. […]
There are a couple hard truths about writing, and I suppose with the creative arts in general. Depending on how you define it, Perfection is either unattainable or it does not exist. Sure, there are certain types of perfection, like a perfect circle… but that’s about it. Even then, when you start examining that perfect […]
I tried perusing TvTropes to see if they had a Sliding Scale to describe exactly what I was thinking of, but alas, they do not. So it falls on me to write this blog post! Originally, this article was going to be about a phenomenon within Horror and Fantasy, but I think that Sci Fi […]
Hopefully by now you’ve not just read through the other parts of this blog series, but also practiced these things. A writer isn’t a writer unless they write. You will never finish your story–any story–unless you put butt in chair and fingers to keyboard. All of you who have done your practice, feel free to […]
So, how does a writer figure out what characters they should put in a story? We’re not talking powers necessarily here—we’re talking about personalities. The answer depends on how many main characters there are in a story. Don’t worry about villains or side characters. Just main characters—just the ones that are central protagonists. And don’t […]
Samuel Fleming Books 