Tweet Yesterday I told the story of a math teacher who kept me in suspense, and ultimately spared me the nightmare of taking more math classes. I also talked about how little I liked math in the first place because it was just a set of soulless rules. And then I promised you another creative […]
Tweet Not too long ago, I unleashed some pretty harsh words on math. (If you don’t feel like following the link, the harsh words were “dang you.”) I didn’t excel at math in high school — not because I didn’t get it, but because I didn’t care. With the strange exception of factoring polynomials, I […]
Tweet Yesterday I explained why you need to know the plot points in your work-in-progress. If you use them right, they can make your story easier to tell and for more compelling to read. Design a Plot Point Like most aspects of writing, all that power and convenience while you’re writing comes directly from the […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about my rites of passage, about the moments in my life when I grew up. They were turning points in my personal history, and both of them significantly changed my plot. Today I want to tell you a little bit about the ways writers capture that slice of the […]
Tweet I’ve talked before about arguments I lost to my dad (the expert debater) back in high school. I can vividly remember the last of those. Well…not the last argument I lost to my dad (which is, God willing, still many, many years in the future), but the last argument I lost in high school. […]
Tweet This week I’m talking about inviolable writing rules (and ranting against the storytelling in The Da Vinci Code). Yesterday I provided a list of rules that I said you should never break, then I admitted that most books break at least one of those, and I closed by saying, “Well, fine, you can break […]
Tweet Okay, first things first, I keep forgetting that I’ve got readers who have never taken a Creative Writing class. If you missed out on that (and, I guess, Latin classes too), then yesterday’s post ended with a much more mysterious cliffhanger than I intended. And, worse, I’m not actually going to get into detail […]
Tweet One lazy Saturday a couple months ago I emerged from a couple hours of writing in the office to find Trish sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Da Vinci Code. She’d seen it before — I’m pretty sure I went to see it at the theater with her — and […]
Tweet I’ve said several times that I started writing when I was twelve. While I was in eighth grade I finished a first novel, The Scorekeeper, which is tragically lost to the sands of time. My next effort, though, is preserved in all its emo glory. The Poet Alexander is basically the 180,000-word story of […]
Tweet I’ve already told the sad story of how I graduated, gave up on my dream, and took a day job. I’ve also since admitted that it wasn’t really all that bad, thanks to some dedicated friends — including one who came to Tulsa to work with me. That was Toby, and before he came […]
