The nuts and bolts of good writing. Character, plot, dialogue, structure, voice, and the techniques that turn a draft into something worth reading. Craft advice from a writer with more than 100 books behind him.
Crime FictionElmore Leonard wrote westerns before his ad agency shift, got turned down eighty-four times on his first crime novel, and then spent forty years proving dialogue could carry a book. His ten rules all do one job: keep the author…
DecemberEmily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems and let ten of them into print, most without her name. Her first editors smoothed out the dashes and capitals to make her sell, and it took until 1955 for readers to see the…
Ghostwriter EthicsInternational Translation Day falls on September 30, the feast of St. Jerome. Translators write every sentence a foreign reader sees and rarely get their names on the cover, which makes them the closest cousins a ghostwriter has.
NovemberKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden three stories underground and couldn't write about it for more than twenty years. When he did, he broke time apart to get there, and Slaughterhouse-Five still shows memoir writers how to approach what…
Fiction WritingStephen King wrote Carrie at a desk between a washer and a dryer, and his wife pulled the first pages out of the trash. Fifty years and 400 million books later, his method is still a daily quota, a three-month…
DialogueElmore 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…
Fiction WritingA 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…
Fiction WritingHilary 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.
Character DevelopmentMary Sue started as a one-page joke in a 1973 Star Trek fanzine. Here's the story behind the parody, how the name spread, what a Mary Sue really is, and when the label is fair.
CreativityToo many beds. Lovers to enemies. A curse only your enemy's kiss can break. Reverse tropes flip one part of a familiar story pattern, and they run on six repeatable moves you can use on any trope, including the one…
Character DevelopmentReal people run on spite, envy and grudges as much as noble causes. The big goal drives the plot, the petty one shows who the character is. Here's why petty motivations make characters believable, and how to give your characters…
Fiction WritingGenre fiction outsells literary fiction because it delivers what readers came for. Calling it poorly written usually confuses taste with skill, and many literary classics are genre books in disguise.
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