Okay, confession: When I generate a story, I don’t think about beats or scenes at all. I just write, because I’m primarily a discovery writer and I need to write in order to understand the characters, the setting, and the story. Usually, though, beats and…
Category: research
[I’m starting a new semi-regular thing on this blog called “Friday Fun and Games” in which I’ll wax on about something fun, and usually game-related (or, at least, play-related!) There may or may not be any craft discussions. Usually there are, since I’m often thinking…
Happy New Year, and happy Friday, friends. I hope you are staying healthy and safe and finding what happiness you can. If you are in the United States, as I am, I hope you are able to find calm after the turbulence of the last…
In the last two weeks of my time at Clarion, we were lucky enough to be taught by Charlie Finlay and Rae Carson, who were extraordinary teachers and also supremely empathetic human beings (in my mind, those two go hand in hand.) We were able…
Happy Saturday, writer friends! If you have the day off today, you might be tempted to spend a LOT of time on writing work. I know I do, any time I’m faced with a stretch of potentially uninterrupted hours, I can start to feel a…
Caroline Duvezin, in a Romancing the Gothic lecture, mentioned this quote from Ted Chiang: “roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic… Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you’re a person… when the universe…
I never follow recipes when I cook. Even when it’s something I’ve never made before. My process is this: I get an idea about something I want to make. Then I Google around and read a bunch of different recipes. I read techniques, I watch…
For over a year (?) now I’ve been following the progress of writing a new novel that Jennifer Crusie is generously sharing on her blog, Argh Ink. I’m learning so much about her process, and it’s incredible that Jenny is documenting so much, because we…