Category Archive

There’s a killer on the loose. He killed five people already. He cuts them to pieces and eats them- yuck. You get home, and the door’s been forced. There’s blood on the floor. Your heart yammers. He’s there, you know it. You round the hallway for the bedroom, and he leaps out, wielding a hatchet, wearing somebody else’s face. You kick him in the crotch. He goes down. You call the police. Hurrah! Feeling fulfilled? Unless that was a spoof movie, you’ve lost the audience forever. It could be a movie or a book, but if you write this, it’s …

Going hot is a term Orson Scott Card uses (in his book Characters and Viewpoint) to describe entering a character’s stream of consciousness. We go into their head and work through their motivations and drives alongside them. It’s something I’m dealing with a lot now in the (third?) redraft of my fantasy book Dawn Rising, learning how to add it in as an intrinsic part of the story. In the first few drafts I hardly did it all, so the book (may have) read like sections of a Dungeon Master’s hand-book, cold and with little sympathetic investment.

I`m over the first hurdle with Dawn, into the second half of the first book*, and find myself dealing with a spate of wimps. My characters are so shocked by what happened in the first half that they stand around gawping, lost in self-pity, filled with indecision. They don`t know what to do and don`t know how to do it. They become wimps. And wimps need killing.

This week I went to the Tokyo Writer’s Workshop for the first time in years. I took with me 8 pages of the first Dawn book, plus its cover letter to agents, hoping to get advice on how to make both more eye-catching and intriguing. The feedback I got was incredibly valuable, and pretty darn surprising. In short, they really liked the 8 pages of actual story, but strongly disliked the cover letter. That’s a big problem, because the cover letter is what agents and publishers see first. In some cases it may be the only thing they see. They …

Recently I’ve been looking to borrow quotes. None of the sources are from authors still living, indeed most of the people I’m looking to borrow from have been dead for hundreds if not thousands of years. They include passages from the Book of Revelations (up there with Ecclesiastes as my favorite Bible book), quotes from ancient translated Indian caste law, quotes on Medieval law from various British kings, quotes on social ills by Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, etc… Is it wrong to do that?

Everybody knows, it`s about conflict. Without conflict a story has no reason to be, it`s just a pretty picture, a post-card. I think about this a lot with regard to the Dawn book I`m working on. I went to a writing group on Sunday and took along three different potential opening scenes. They each belong to three separate drafts, and are different ways of presenting the beginning of the tale. I asked the 5 other members in the group to let me know which one got their attention the most, and why. Of course I would hoping they`d choose the …

I was writing several scenes (of my first Dawn book) set in a graveyard recently, trying to get across the wealth and variety of gravestone types within it, but not really succeeding. I got frustrated and disappointed. If I couldn`t show-case the bizarre variety of an ancient and storied graveyard, how could I expect to sell people on a whole fantasy world?

I just saw the movie Kickass, and loved it. Of all the superhero movies out there, it was the one that most made me actually get up on the edge of my seat as the main guy goes into battle. He seems real, and it seems like he could get hurt. He of course does, quite a lot.
At the same time, you`ve got Hit Girl bouncing around like your traditional super hero, just about impervious to damage, killing dudes in their slews. The film-makers get to have their cake and eat it too.

How is it done?