Writing first chapters makes me think of wallpapering a room. If you don’t get that initial strip of gingham checks on right, every new addition will be askew. The finished project will be totally off kilter. I have a novel I’ve been revising for years. The first chapter never quite worked, but instead of fixing it I kept on writing. What was wrong about the first chapter bled into the second and things just got worse and worse. Big mistake. … Read More »

Good historical fiction is doubly hard to write. Not only are there the usual problems of writing good “fiction”: well plotted, richly detailed, stuffed with fascinating characters. But “historical” demands that whole additional burden of research, so that the end result is a convincing representation of a past time and often distant place. Why should we even bother? Now Feels Pretty Good In the first place, we and our readers find it entertaining, like a good History Channel program. It’s … Read More »

Besides the satisfaction of seeing our words published, what other basic characteristic might writers have in common? Hint: it makes publication possible. Annie Dillard lays it out for us in her book, The Writing Life, when she relays a mini-story of a fellow writer who had a student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “do you like sentences?” We don’t find out what the student thought or did after that answer, but … Read More »

Our main characters need to be people our readers can relate to, admire, or even aspire to be like. On the other hand, if we go too far we risk creating a Mary Sue or Marty Stu. Mary and Marty are unrealistically gifted, universally loved, movie star handsome or beautiful, amazingly talented, wonderfully wealthy, unbelievably lucky, the stuff of daydreams. To be believable, even the most relatable character needs to have some personal flaws, some things they aren’t good at, … Read More »

Is your protagonist a surly recluse, a man or woman of few words, a guy with a drinking problem and an attitude? That describes a lot of lead characters in mystery novels. Still, like the rest of us, your antisocial hero /heroine needs somebody to talk to. Invariably students in my novel writing courses wanted to open their first chapters with detailed biographies and lengthy physical descriptions of their protagonist. It’s tempting. Once you’ve got all that background information out … Read More »

While a novel set in the past is fiction and has a right to present imaginary events and personages, it is not (normally) fantasy, and thus certain standards of authenticity must be observed. Otherwise, it moves into the category of alternative history. Different readers will obviously bring differing standards of expectations to this issue, but it seems worthwhile for us writers to consider what our own standards are. Because authenticity makes historical fiction a doubly demanding genre: a historical novel … Read More »