From Scott: Naming your characters (and the places and things) in your story can be more challenging than it appears at first glance. After all, they’re your characters, so you can name them whatever you want, right? True, but to
Read MoreFrom Rick: Immortal characters can be interesting and challenging for a writer to deal with in fiction. Anytime a writer decides to put an immortal character into his fiction, a number of problems and challenges will confront him. The biggest
Read MoreFrom Rick: This week I figured I’d change things up a bit and get away from the doom and gloom about publishing challenges, although I don’t think those challenges will be going away anytime soon. The best advice I can
Read MoreFrom Rick: Last week I put up the link to the podcast I participated in on “The Pros and Cons of Collaboration,” which ended up being the first part of two. As of this blog post, Part 2 is not
Read MoreFrom Rick: Previously I talked about what readers look for in terms of the writing style: clean and follows good writing conventions, or if it’s unconventional, it’s not so difficult to read that the reader becomes frustrated and puts it
Read MoreFrom Rick: In a past article, I dealt with the topic of backstory in your writing. I discussed where to place it and how much to use, and I linked to a couple of examples. First, check out that previous
Read MoreFrom Rick: If you ask ten authors what the hardest part of writing a novel is, you may get ten different answers, but I suspect that many of those answers will be some variant of getting it organized (and a
Read MoreFrom Scott: When it comes to opening a business, I’ve heard it said that the key to success is “location, location, location.” A similar axiom can be applied to writing a novel, but the catch phrase is “research, research, research.”
Read MoreGUEST POST BY KELLEE KRANENDONK From Kellee: Sometimes minor details are just that. But sometimes little things have a way of becoming big things. So how do you know what details to include in your story and what to omit?
Read MoreFrom Scott: For writers of science fiction and fantasy, a special challenge arises. Unless you have specifically set the milieu for your project on the Earth, in a set time and place, you will need to create a lot of
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