I had the pleasure of talking with students at Waupun High School yesterday. My mission: to share my educational background, professional writing experiences, writing advice, and tips for getting published with the fledgling writers.
Whether they are still in the planning phase, frantically pounding out the first draft, or up to their elbows in edits, here are a handful of ways you can support any writers who cross your path.
The more I think about it, the more a term like “character-oriented” seems superfluous. Characters are but one element of a story. Like setting and plot, they are essential ingredients of a story. But are they any more important than the rest?
Once you establish the worth of a product—whether it’s a frozen pizza or national news—it’s awfully difficult to convince people they should have been paying along.
I’ve read 3,009 articles about how fiction writers need to become savvy marketers and self-promoters if they want their books to succeed commercially, and I fear I’m becoming a convert.
Since no two minds work precisely the same way, no two writers are going to approach planning, plot structure, character development, research, writing, and editing exactly the same way. A method that works for one author might result in utter failure for another.
I must have killed hundreds of people over the years. Since I’m a writer of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, death come with the territory.
A writer’s mind can be a dangerous thing. Perhaps the most notorious forms of self-sabotage are writer’s block and a related syndrome: the sophomore slump.
In this third installment of a series exploring the anatomy of a well-adjusted writer, the focus falls on another overlooked—and arguably undervalued—trait...
Despite having written between one and two million words to date, only a handful of them were spent in pursuit of poetry. And whenever I did venture from the comfort zone of fiction, it was typically because a teacher assigned it.