Georges Polti’s The thirty-Six Dramatic Situations serves as interesting reference material because of his basic premise: that there’s no such thing as an original plot. Humankind exhausted its store of fresh, new situations long ago; “there is nothing new under the sun…”
Tweet This week I’ve been talking about my experience with National Novel Writing Month in 2007. Thursday featured a big bragging story about my 120,000-word month, and yesterday I gave some useful advice about how to handle too much of a good thing. Nobody’s really coming here looking for advice about that, though, are they? […]
Tweet I talked yesterday about my amazingly successful first NaNoWriMo — in terms of word count, anyway. It’s hard for me to give myself too much credit for the book, though. It’s still in its first draft state, and sitting in limbo as the third book in a four-part series that’s still missing a decent […]
Tweet Last week I haunted you all with threats of the pending National Novel Writing Month, stating a little prematurely that “Next month, you’re going to write a novel.” I watched (and even commented on) your public reactions to that claim, and some of you were rightly terrified at the time investment looming oh-so-near. Others […]
Part of my joy in writing has always been finding out what makes people tick and integrating that knowledge into my characters. I also wanted to use my talents to help others, so psychology seemed a great fit. Much to my dismay, I discovered fairly early on that to pursue this vocation to its fullest, I would need at least a master’s degree, if not a doctorate…
Tweet Hmm…I seem to have started something of a panic among those of you who already know NaNoWriMo. Take a deep breath. You’ve got a month and a half still before you’re even supposed to start. I started discussing it now for those who haven’t done it before, though. It can take some convincing, especially […]
Tweet Yesterday I told you how I bullied my dad and older sister into writing their first novels. I’m pretty sure both of them would jump at the chance to thank me for it. I can’t do that for you. I’m going to do my best to try — as Unstressed Syllables lumbers toward its […]
Tweet I’ve talked before about my miserable years in Tulsa, and how they coincided with my failed efforts to shop my novel to publishers. Essentially, I spent my first year out of college rewriting Taming Fire, and then my second year shopping it around. Now, while I was shopping that novel, I did what every […]
I am technologically illiterate. I am not up on the latest gadgets, gizmos, whizgigs, and whatsits. Facebook was around a good five years before I even heard of it, and I resisted Twitter for as long as I possibly could. Printer cables mystify me… So when this fellow writer, she of the sparkly vegetarian blood-suckers, confronted me with this alien creature known as playlist.com, I almost didn’t know what to do with myself…
Tweet This week I stopped complaining about restrictive writing rules in favor of more generous advice. It’s really a continuation of the same theme, though. Write what you know. and Tell your readers what they need to know. The trick to both of those, really, is knowing what you know (and, of course, what you […]
