by Jeremiah Tolbert
I once sat beside a campfire in Washington and listened to a man with a pistol strapped to his waist lecture for an hour about the ecology and habits of the Sasquatch. Meanwhile, my companions–a college professor and two high school teachers–had taken up buckets in a circle around our camp and were drumming to attract the great skunk ape into our midst.
by Nancy Fulda
My oldest sister is very wise. Once, long ago, when I was struggling to master a difficult situation, she sent me a letter about strength and weakness. The gist of the content was this: Many strengths are the flip side of weakness.
From the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust: This winter, the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust is offering three live online courses with the same high quality and rigorous approach as its acclaimed, in-person Odyssey workshop: Showing versus Telling in Fantastic Fiction, One Brick at a Time: Crafting Compelling Scenes, and Effective Endings in Speculative Fiction. […]
by Cat Rambo
Are you putting words on the page? Then you are doing it right.
You may not be creating publishable words. You may not be creating amazing words. You may not be creating words you like. But by creating words, you are doing something actual, tangible, verifiable. And that puts you ahead of all the people who aren’t writing.
by Nancy Fulda
Villains are challenging to write. Make them too heartless, and no one will find them believable. Make them too empathetic, and the audience will end up rooting for the wrong team. It can be difficult to create an antagonist with enough human virtue to be interesting and enough human foibles to be, well, villainous.
by William Ledbetter
The email was short and straightforward. I identified myself as a science fiction writer who was curious about one aspect of their paper.
by Matthew Kressel
It’s become a cliché, the tortured writer beset by periods of crippling self-doubt. But things become clichés simply because they have been true for so many. Writing, for most people I know, is an experience of few victories and many small defeats.
by Barbara A. Barnett
So my takeaway from all this babbling is this: how you write isn’t always about getting words down. Sometimes it’s about looking at other aspects of your life and figuring out if there are changes you can make that will improve your ability to get those words down.
by Juliette Wade
I love to use non-English languages in a story. To me, a foreign language behaves like a form of music – it creates mood and atmosphere for the readers who don’t understand it, and it further creates a layer of meaning for those readers who do understand it.
by Juliette Wade
I love to use non-English languages in a story. To me, a foreign language behaves like a form of music–it creates mood and atmosphere for the readers who don’t understand it, and it further creates a layer of meaning for those readers who do understand it.
Arthur has conquered the first floor of the Tower and with a new ally, he’s got a real chance of building his Clan. The problem is, their alliance hinges on one factor: speed. Survival is no longer the only goal—it’s a speed run to the top.
Mary G. Thompson is the acclaimed author of Flicker and Mist, Wuftoom, and Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, which was the winner of the Westchester Fiction Award and a finalist for the Missouri Gateway Award. Thompson’s short fiction has appeared in Dark Matt
