Your villain is boring
Keeping the villain theme going, I find that the antagonist is often the weakest link in SFF stories. Writers lavish attention on their protagonist, craft…
Posts tagged: writing
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Trust your reader
One of the hardest lessons for science fiction and fantasy writers is learning to trust the reader. You've invented this incredible world. You understand its…
Films vs. Novels
I spent most of my writing life in screenwriting before transitioning to novels. I assumed the skills would transfer smoothly. They did not. The most important…
Do you actually want to write?
An uncomfortable question worth contemplating is, do you actually want to write, or have you absorbed that desire from somewhere else? The French thinker René…
Why your dialogue sounds fake (and how to fix it)
Dialogue is one of those things that feels like it should be easy. We all talk. We've been listening to conversations our entire life. How hard can it be to…
Pantsing is just writing a very long, expensive outline
There's a long-running debate in writing circles between “plotters” and “pantsers.” Plotters outline their stories in advance. Pantsers fly by the seat…
The mistakes everyone makes in their first chapter
First chapters are hard. They're ones I always spend the most time worrying at. You're trying to do everything at once: establish character, set up the world,…
The three questions every scene must answer
David Mamet — playwright, screenwriter, and famously direct writing teacher — articulated three questions that I now use constantly. Whenever a scene isn't…
Wear the silly shirt
Robert Rankin — the wonderfully strange author of *The Antipope* and *The Brentford Triangle* — once gave me a piece of advice that sounded like a joke but…
Tropes that need a long rest
Every genre has its clichés. Patterns that once felt fresh, got repeated, and are now so worn that readers groan when they see them coming. Here are some SFF…