No matter what the genre, a bit of sexual tension can perk up your storytelling. Years ago I wrote romance novels. This is what that experience taught me. Love is a lot more interesting when it’s all about the conflict. Readers are surprised when I tell them that a romance is a love story. But not all love stories are romances. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a love story. The conflict in that classic play is not between the lovers. … Read More »

If you write science fiction or fantasy, or aspire to, you’ve probably heard of worldbuilding. In a nutshell, worldbuilding means constructing an imaginary setting. If you do and it’s consistent and logical within its own parameters, however outlandish they may be, you’ve won readers. Build a world without really thinking it through and veteran readers of the genre will abandon it in droves. And what better teacher to start with than one who pioneered worldbuilding? H.G. Wells was a thinker … 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 »