writing

  • Stuck: the three narrative mistakes that plunge me into writer’s block

    Photo by Aubrey Rose Odom on Unsplash So i’m in the midst of writing a new novel, and reader, I got stuck. I got stuck so bad that I had to go crying to my agent, Caitlin McDonald, who got back to me with the solution. And I realized something – just about every…

  • What Makes a Hyper-competent Character Relatable?

    The day after I wrote my Ten Questions for Characters post I had a discord conversation about a question asked in the #writerspatch twitter chat on Sunday, Jan 13: “Does relatability to the reader make a character more believable?” And sure, the answer is obviously yes. But where’s the rest of the owl? How…

  • Ten Questions I Ask New Characters – And Why I’m Asking

    Some people have long and detailed lists of questions they answer for their characters, right down to what they carry around in their pockets. Others simply have characters appear to them, fully formed, ready to live the story from the beginning. I think I have a little bit of the latter, in that characters…

  • How I Abandon Organization While Planning a Novel

    Sometimes people look at my process and say, “that’s so organized, I have no idea how you do this in such a tidy way, I could never do that. How do you do it so neatly?” The answer is that I don’t try, at first. That organization is the last thing I do, not…

  • Writing advice nobody asked for, but anyway

    So that’s not exactly true. Sometimes people ask me for writing advice. I’m no Johnathan Franzen – I’m a fantasy writer, working at the intersection of art, entertainment, and commercial appeal. I enjoy what I do, and I have the pleasure of knowing hundreds of people who like it too. These aren’t rules, exactly.…

  • Scene Outlines, Explained in Great Detail

    A scene is a unit of dramatic action. Emphasis on drama.

  • What’s Your Next Book? The Brightest Timeline Knows.

    (note: this was originally a twitter thread. You can read the original thread here.) Since it’s easier to solve other people’s problems than your own, I procrastinated on my own scene problems to listen to another writer’s dilemma about which book to write next. What follows is a trick for figuring out what you…

  • How to Brainstorm Scene Location Details from a Panic-stopping Technique

    (This blog post was originally a thread on twitter, rewritten to be a decent blog post.) The first scene I need to write today takes place in a new setting location. For new setting locations I write up descriptions that I can use not just as backdrop but as elements to bring the reality…

  • A Visual Guide to a Reverse Outline

    107k Words. 76 Scenes. 16 Pages. What you’re looking at is an essential document for the complex operation that is transforming my first draft into a revised draft. It’s scary, isn’t it? I like to think that it’s beautifully organized. That’s the entire scene by scene outline of the first draft of Stormsong –…

  • Doing it backwards

    Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to yoke your Character arc to the external plot. When I’m planning, I have a series of questions I ask myself when I’m making sure that I have the right character for the shiny plot idea I figured out, but when I’m making sure that the arc…