Thursday, February 25, 2010
Maybe you don’t care at all about role-playing games. Maybe you rolled your eyes and growled “Nerd!” when I mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. It doesn’t matter. As a storyteller, that last paragraph should have your mouth watering. The job of the storyteller is to create characters that adhere to certain rules, that behave consistently and believably, that create a cohesive and rational experience out of of a bunch of people doing things their own way.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
At some point, we’ve got to move the discussion from, “How do you make a really great sentence?” to “How do you make a really great story?” There’s lots of milestones along that path — descriptions of setting, descriptions of events, compelling dialogs, scenes, chapters, acts, it goes on and on. But before you can really make much progress on any of those intermediate things, you’ve got to understand your ultimate goal — you have to understand exactly what a story is.
Tweet WIPs, or Works-in-Progress, are often the favorite topics of creative writers. I realize now I was a fool to wait so long to invite you to talk about yours! That’s this week’s Creative Writing exercise, though. In light of our recent discussion of the various stages of manuscript development, I want you to tell […]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Tweet Back in 2008, I was talking my good friend Julie into participating in National Novel Writing Month, and she expressed some concern that her writing wouldn’t be good enough. I thought about it for a moment, trying to figure out how to encourage her enough that she would go ahead with it, and at […]
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Tweet My two-year-old daughter got a set of building blocks for Christmas, and that got me thinking about how to make you a better writer. No, really. One of her favorite games for a long time now has been “stack and smash.” She started doing it with empty thread spools, putting two or three together […]
Friday, December 18, 2009
Tweet Between my About page, my introductory article, and just the name of the website, I’ve already made a lot of big promises. Turning Technical Writing into a simple, stress-free task is no small feat, but we’re going to get started right now. While reading that introductory material, you may have noticed that I referred […]
