Writers and marketing. In this digital age, the two words are becoming synonymous, but to what end? Having been on both sides of the fence, this is a difficult post for me to write. This isn’t the sort of thing I care to admit or highlight to people, because writers are a unique breed.
Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter.
Readers want to hope and fear for a character. To feel this, they must not know what WILL happen, but do need to suspect or know what MIGHT happen and feel tension about the possibilities.
Character and problem by themselves don’t go anywhere. You still have to build reader tension to a sharp point. So how do you do that?
In my last two posts, I identified a number of things that make people and, therefore, characters interesting to us. In this post, I’ll present the last two draws and introduce the next condition for reader suspense.
I would like to share ten resources, more or less, that I think are really terrific when it comes to getting the science right. These will be biased toward my areas of expertise, and will span books, websites, and software. Old-fashioned books first.
The Washington Science Fiction Association has established a literary award to honor the work done by small presses in promoting and preserving science fiction.
All life is nurtured by death, and a story is defined not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Our fiction cannot take on life unless we are willing destroy all of the beautiful possibilities but one: the best one.
We cannot help but be interested in characters who are, do, or have things we want. In fact, this is one of the main draws of fiction–experiencing something wonderful or cool, even if it’s vicariously.
BBC World Service, in partnership with the British Council, launches the 12th Annual Radio Playwriting Competition, which invites writers from around the world to submit a one-hour radio play on any subject.
In my last two posts I discussed the fact that readers are not going to hope and fear for a character unless that character raises their sympathy and sense of deservingness. But is that enough? Do readers stick around if the characters are utterly boring?
All of us have an automatic scale of justice inside of us. We can’t turn it off. Nor can we ignore it. It’s very simple. If someone’s bad outweighs their good, then we think they don’t deserve good things. Conversely, if someone’s good outweighs their bad, we think they should be happy.
