Drafting is essential to creating good work. With each rewrite and revision, the superfluous words and ideas are winnowed away, while the story comes into focus. But you know what is necessary before you do all that time consuming and tedious drafting? Prewriting. I love prewriting. Prewriting is that exciting process where ethereal ideas becomes nascent story. The possibilities are endless. Before I write a story, I put together an outline with important story beats and note where themes will … Read More »

Let’s get in the Halloween spirit this week by examining horror, the all-encompassing genre of fear. Within horror exists many sub-genres including supernatural, slasher, sci-fi, zombie, humor, survival, and many more, yet for this discussion we’ll focus on psychological horror. Horror has evolved over hundreds of years from eternal damnation and supernatural monsters to the evil hiding inside our own minds. One of the first examples of horror writing was the description of the nine rings of Hell in Dante’s … Read More »

We’ve all heard of (and endured) the “messy middle” of a story. When I get there, I start to feel fatigued; perhaps my characters do, too. They also seem uncertain, hesitant, and fearful of what’s to come. They hold back with good reason — the middle of my stories contains the low point, and what’s coming won’t be good. Since they’re not inclined to help, I need to figure out how to get through it and bring those that will … Read More »

It’s October, and pumpkin spice latte is in the air. So is a renewed popular interest in one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson. And because she enjoyed a bit of the macabre in her work, let’s celebrate her this spooky month. We associate Edgar Allan Poe with anything simultaneously poetic and macabre, with obvious good reason. And Dickinson was undoubtedly influenced by Poe. Everyone read him, after all. And like him, Dickinson often explored darkness in her writing. A … Read More »

Figures of speech enliven our poems and stories. My favorite is metaphor. There’s an old silly saying, “What’s a metaphor for?” I say metaphors are for doing life-enhancing jobs, like surgeons. Acting as a surgeon, a metaphor can inject life into a tired sentence, replace a worn-out cliché, and heal a broken story. Merriam-Webster tells us metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place … Read More »

Not having come to fiction writing through an MFA program, I was never told up front, “This is what makes a novel good.” Exactly what constituted good writing was something my longtime reader’s head had to figure out for itself: if that’s what I like in a book, then that’s the way I want my books to sound. Now — having studied writing, attended conferences, gotten feedback from editors and beta-readers, etc., etc.—having done, in short all the things we … Read More »