People have a natural desire to reduce everyone and everything to a simple descriptor as a way of making sense of the world around them. For writers, this means you can be very easily (and permanently) pegged as a Thriller Writer, a Sci-Fi Writer—or any of a dozen other genre categories. And generally, once a writer has […]
If there’s great big red flag in fiction, it’s making your main character a writer. Making him not just a writer but a novelist is a flag so big and red it’s practically a hot air balloon rising off the page. Why? Because as the old adage goes, writers write what they know, and if they’re writing […]
Suspension of disbelief is a heck of a thing. Some books ask for a little more heavy lifting than others, especially when travel from the “real world” to an alternate universe is involved. No one wants a dissertation on quantum physics, but sometimes the mechanisms for traveling to a magical land are startlingly… well, the […]
Clichés develop for a reason, whether it’s simple storytelling convenience or as an element of realism. But what starts off as a neat idea or a perfectly reasonable reflection of real life gets repeated over and over, slowly evolving into a groaner of a cliché that angers readers when they encounter it for the hundredth […]
Writers and Nigerian princes trying to move millions of dollars out of their country know one absolute truth: If you present people with enough documentation, they will suspend their disbelief. That’s why so many epic fantasy stories come with detailed, hand-drawn maps. The first 20 or 30 books I ever read all had maps in […]
