Craft articles for fiction writers covering character development, dialogue, plotting, point of view, pacing, and the full range of storytelling techniques. Grounded in the experience of writing dozens of novels and 45+ handbooks on fiction craft, all available at Master of Worlds.
FictionElmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing all keep the writer out of sight so the reader stays in the story. I follow most of them and break a few on purpose, from short teaser prologues to long descriptions of places…
FictionA good prologue works like a TV cold open: a short scene that hands the reader a question and walks away. A bad one is a history lecture before the story starts. Here's how to tell them apart, with examples…
FictionRobert Heinlein's 1961 novel about Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians who comes to Earth and looks at humanity from the outside. It won the Hugo Award, gave the language the word grok, and was the first science…
FictionHeinlein's 1963 novel about Podkayne Fries, a fifteen-year-old girl from Mars traveling to Earth with her troublemaking younger brother. It's best known now for the fight over its ending. Heinlein lost that fight, and his readers eventually won it back.
FictionIsaac Asimov's 1950 collection of nine robot stories, framed as the memories of robopsychologist Susan Calvin. It's where the Three Laws of Robotics took hold, and it's where I started reading Asimov at about eight years old.
FictionTim Dorsey's first novel, a 1999 black comedy that introduced Serge A. Storms, a history-obsessed Florida killer with a moral code. Dorsey wrote it in secret while working nights at the Tampa Tribune.
FictionMark Sullivan's 2017 novel based on the life of Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who guided Jews over the Alps and then spied on a Nazi general as his driver. Sullivan spent about a decade on it, and it became…
FictionSylvia Plath's only novel, published in London in 1963 under a pseudonym, about a gifted young woman's slide into depression after a summer internship in New York. It remains the benchmark for depression in fiction.
FictionKenn Brody's science fiction thriller about Aura, an artificial intelligence contacted by the most advanced civilization in the galaxy, while a criminal group seizes the world's fissile material. Kenn was a founding member of the critique group I started in…
FictionKenn Brody's science fiction novel about Zila Aropova Biddey, sent across the galaxy by a mysterious Sage to find the origin of LUCA, the common ancestor of all life. What she finds instead is an ancient entity that opposes life…
FictionA 2016 science fiction novelette by Kenn Brody. Shannon Redwine wants to be a video reporter, so she has a ham radio mentor surgically install a broadcaster in her, and what she puts on the air makes powerful enemies.
FictionHilary Layne of The Second Story argues that explicit sex is dragging fiction down. Part of the case holds up: sex is optional, motion-by-motion scenes rarely earn their length, and a market that sells on heat lets the story slide.
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