The herring fish of Eugene Field’s poem “Winken, Blinken and Nod” was probably a special glittering creature, because the fishermen went after them with nets of silver and gold. Writers, on the other hand, are always interested in the infamous red herring. A device especially employed in mysteries, it can be used in other genres as well. What is a red herring and how can it be a helpful item on your authorial menu? Let’s take a look. A false … Read More »

My blog today is addressed mainly to those of my colleagues who are writing a series or a trilogy, and it’s probably something you already know, but a reminder never hurts. You’ve started off your series with a great book that plunged us immediately into the time and place. Something spectacular has happened to start a chain reaction that will play out over the next few volumes. And finally, you stuck your ending, and readers are breathing heavily and saying, … Read More »

The writer’s group to which I belong recently instituted a new practice, which doesn’t replace but enhances our reading of our works in progress. At every meeting, one of us provides the group with a prompt—an image, a few words—and we all create some short work inspired by it to submit for critique at the next meeting. The variety of “takes” on the prompt is always stunning. Some are serious, some are lighthearted. This person may submit a poem, another … Read More »

We all want our novels to be so full of sensual detail that the reader can imagine everything in technicolor. Is there such a thing as too much description? Clearly, every reader’s expectations — and every author’s style — is different, so “too much” is a range, not a point. Nobody has to warn us against purple prose. But is that really too much description, or is it bad description? A typical purple problem is to use an extreme amount … Read More »

Some while back, one of my blogging colleagues wrote that even before writers are lovers of words, they must be lovers of sentences. Without disagreeing at all, I would like to explore a little more the sense in which we must also be lovers of words, logophiles—it’s a step of detail in our writing that can’t be bypassed. Chances are you’re already a logophile. I sure am. As a kid, while the rest of the family watched “Have Gun, Will … Read More »

A blogging colleague recently looked at some ways in which the setting of a novel could become so dynamic as to be a real character. I would like to expand upon that idea, because just as you want every character to be deep and three-dimensional, so it would be a shame to waste the opportunities setting gives you to deepen the whole story. The Gormenghast Syndrome In Mervyn Peake’s off-beat trilogy, the eponymous castle of Gormenghast might be said to … Read More »