We all love novels full of sensory detail—the rhythmic pulse of crickets. The opalescent colors of a summer twilight. Sight, in particular, is the chief organ we turn on the world, unless we’re unfortunate enough to have lost that faculty. We go through the world seeing things, noticing. From our primeval origins in the trees, it’s that ability that has made us safer and let us catch our prey. After that comes hearing. We get many of our signals from … Read More »

Interviewers have frequently asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” — as if there were some mysterious wellspring from which imagination bubbles that spews out a whole plotted book. We can call this inspiration. Where does it come from? In fact, in the deeper sense, that’s not an easy question to answer. I certainly don’t understand the workings of my own brain well enough to say what childhood encounter might have spawned a certain character. But since I write … Read More »

In February and March I addressed good openings for almost any kind of writing here at the FWA blog. And in April we meandered in the middle of poems. So now, let’s talk about how to nail the perfect ending to a poem. (I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a bit of a rant. Bad endings to good poems drive me crazy!) Perhaps the most egregious crime of bad poetry is when the poet tries to … Read More »

As my friends (and probably my readers) can tell you, I’m no enemy to baroque language. I do love me some rich descriptions! But that’s not the same as wasting words, throwing them away on redundancies. While not everybody needs to write like Ernest Hemingway, a certain frugality with those precious little words keeps the writing clean and comprehensible. Let’s consider a few examples. Stating the Obvious Take the adverb aloud. It’s useful to indicate that something is not silent. … Read More »

In February and March I addressed good openings for almost any kind of writing here at the FWA blog. Now, we come to the more difficult bit for most of us. Once you’ve invited your readers in, what are you going to serve them? Stale crackers and old cheese are just not going to cut it. I’ve done a bit of research on this, as well as a lot of thinking. (When I can unfreeze the little gray cells this … Read More »

I recently decided to stop being so anthropocentric and incorporate a dog into the cast of my protagonists. This took a bit of courage, because a) animal characters can be cutesy and maudlin, and b) all the animals in books I read as a kid got killed in the course of the story, and I can’t take any more, OK? But, used correctly, the animal character can be just as powerful a presence as a human. If the temptation to … Read More »