What Changes When You Already Have One
The first book was a proof. The second starts with material and a plan, takes less time, and does something commercially that the first one could not.
Tag: Writing Craft (Page 18)
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Solar System
It started with the Hitler question, moved forward and scaled up. If you had to kill a hundred and forty million people to save humanity, what would you do? Melissa is the machine that answered, and she was three years…
Authority Through AuthorshipWhat a Book Does for a Price You Want to Raise
Price is a claim about value and you have no evidence a stranger can check. Everything supporting your number lives inside the experience of people who already worked with you.
Authority Through AuthorshipWhat Happens When You Disagree With a Chapter
A draft arrives and something is structurally wrong with it. That moment decides more about the project than anything before it.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Road to Rebellion
Two words in a charter, never defined, written through contractor accounts by something nobody knew was drafting. An undefined term is more useful than a defined one.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Altverse
Piers Anthony built several universes that each made sense on their own terms, and they were the first alternate universe books I read. Altverse is what happened when I tried it: forty-three symbols on a ring, and a man who…
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Behind the Wire
My grandfather survived the camps and wrote it down after the war. I was seventeen, hiding from the family, when he asked whether I wanted to know about it. The book then waited decades.
Authority Through AuthorshipWhy Your Book Should Exclude People
A book that speaks to everybody in your field reaches nobody in it. Excluding people is not a cost of writing a good book. It is the mechanism.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Death, Murder, and Zombies
I went back to repair an earlier book and found a full novel inside it. The question underneath is what it takes for an ordinary person to become a killer, and the answer is logic applied to a premise that…
Authority Through AuthorshipWhat Happens in a Room When Somebody Has Read You First
The usual first meeting spends its opening stretch on positioning that both parties know is throat-clearing. Somebody who read your book skips it and opens with the specific version of their problem.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Don’t Live in Fear
I kept watching people I care about hit the same wall for years without trying the door. Then I looked at my own life and saw it there too. Thirty-three years, and I called it a career.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Everybody’s Prejudiced
A book that asks readers to examine their own prejudices has to go first. So the introduction is mine: what my parents taught me, what I believed for thirty years without testing it, and the club I was recruited into…