Behind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
Tag: fiction writing
Fiction lives or dies on craft. These articles cover the work of writing a story people cannot put down: character, plot, pacing, and dialogue. The skills that turn a good idea into a book a reader finishes at two in the morning.
fiction writingBehind the Book: Dungeon
In 1981 I fell in love with a text game called Dungeon, the predecessor of Zork. Forty years later I turned it into a novel. Here is why, and the decision that saved the book.
ConsciousnessBehind the Book: The Eternal War
The Eternal War started with one question: what happens when an AI goes to Hell? Not a person with a soul, but a machine that cannot find the pattern in eternal punishment.
fiction writingBehind the Book: Through the Looking Glass
The first Behind the Book essay: how my first novel grew from a Facebook message, fourteen hours of Skype interviews under a no-lying rule, a pen name I later retired, and an ending that refused a rescue.
fiction writingDave Could See That Jim Was Hurt. What Does That Even Mean?
She was happy. He was terrified. The hotel was romantic. Every one of those is the author reaching a conclusion the reader was supposed to reach.
fiction writingGhostwriting Suspense: Engineering Dread on the Page
Ghostwriting suspense is engineering dread. Every scene has to tighten the screw, controlling what the reader knows and when.
fiction writingThings We Lost After the Year 2000 and Why They Mattered
Nostalgia is mostly a lie, but some of what we traded away after 2000 cost us something real. DVDs you actually owned, phone numbers in your head, the map of your own city, boredom that fed your imagination. A clear-eyed…
fiction writingHow to Write a Story From an Alien Point of View
Most writers who try to write a nonhuman character just put a human in a costume. Writing a real alien, animal, or AI point of view means subtracting yourself, one assumption at a time, until what is left is a…
fiction writingWhat a Mars Colony Will Actually Look Like
The Mars colony in the movies, a gleaming glass dome with green gardens and sunset views, would kill everyone inside a week. The real thing will be buried under meters of red dirt, built by robots before anyone arrives, and…
fiction writingWhat Was the Big Bang, the First Nanosecond, and What Came Before
The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was the beginning of space, and the wildest events in cosmic history happened in the first sliver of a second. A plain-language tour of the first nanosecond, what the leftover…
Creative WritingSensory Details: How to Put a Reader Inside the Scene
Sensory details are what make writing feel real. The craft is choosing the few right details instead of piling on every sense at once.
fiction writingGhostwriting Crime Fiction: Authenticity Without the Lecture
Crime fiction lives or dies on plausibility. Ghostwriting it means getting the details right without letting research smother the story.