Next in our series of examining my Writing Tips in more detail is The Foil.   The Foil:    Use other characters to showcase the strengths of your main characters and to make them seem extraordinary.    The best example of the idea of a “foil”, in fact the place that the term comes from, is Hal from Shakespeare’s King…

Still spending too much time recovering from our computer outage, so it’s been hard to write something new this week. I did try yesterday, but what I wrote came out…dumb.  So, today what we have is the begining of How Can I Have A Life And Still Write, an article I wrote for: The Complete Guide To Writing Fantasy Volume Three.…

Here is the second in my ongoing essays about my list of writing tips: The Trick: Raising expectations in one direction but having the story go in the opposite direction. The Trick is the secret to writing, the thing that makes a story work: expectation followed by something other than the expected outcome – but…

In the comments thread of my last writing post, a question arose about what I meant by a scene needing two ideas to make it come alive. Glancing back at my Writing Tips list, I noticed that this idea is the very first thing listed. It occurred to me that it might be a good…

I was going to write about something else today, but I decided to put it off. Instead, I think I’ll tackle the topic of Writer’s Block (which was brought up by one of the nice folks over at John’s blog.) Only, I can’t think of anything to say on the topic: Writer’s Block about Writer’s…

In his Writing the Breakout Novel books, agent Donald Maass has many good suggestions and exercises, but there is one that stands out to me above the rest because it is a discover as basic as shading in art. At some point in the past, there was a guy who invented the technique of shading.…

It is Wednesday, and I finally get a chance to write about what I have been itching to write about for months now, my favorite writing book: Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.   I have looked at many writing books. Normally, I do not find them to be helpful. The majority of them…

First, if you are looking for our China Updates, scroll down two posts. There are a bunch of them among the writing posts below.   Second, there were two writing posts I could not cross post from China:           Guest Blog by David B. Coe, Fantasy writer extraordinaire           Guest Blog by Misty Massey, author…

The Wednesday post is late today. I will not bother with excuses, except to say if you ever have the opportunity to avoid having to steam clean and fumigate (which involves removing and washing or at least drying every scrap of clothing in the bedrooms) your house on the same day—and you can do so…