The Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is a story structure based on Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he lays out the commonalities...
Craft
These articles concentrate on the craft of writing. Use the menu on the right to get more specific or just browse them sequentially.
Crafting a Magic System
If you ask a thousand fantasy authors what makes a good magic system, you’ll get a thousand different answers. I am not going to give...
Genres for the Independent Author
Genres are a fascinating part of the writing profession. They mean nothing and everything; they are both limiting and freeing; they are arbiters and arbitrary...
Signaling Your Genre from the Start
If you’re an independent author, you’ve probably done a lot of work on your title, blurb, and cover. Don’t screw it all up with the...
Writing Action
I am going to get right to the point and tell you the secret of writing action scenes: It’s not about the action. Like everything...
Simplicity
“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.” Walt Whitman Way back when I was...
Speculative Fiction — The Big “If” Umbrella
More and more, books and publications that were once exclusively science fiction or fantasy or horror are calling themselves “speculative fiction.” But what is speculative...
Food for Thought?
We talk a lot about how to write better and the tools you need to do that, but we don’t talk a lot about the...
Writing That Resonates
Resonate. It’s the word I use most often when talking about writing. But what does it really mean? Take the word home. The dictionary definition...
What to Do When the Writing Won’t Work
Sometimes the writing just won’t work. The words won’t come, or they’re all wrong when they do. Even if you manage to type something, you...