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No writer wants to hear that his story is “predictable.” It one of the worst criticisms you can give a writer. It suggests tedium and dullness.  At the same time writers are told that characters should be consistent, that they should never lurch from the rules that govern their personalities – in other words, characters […]

Writing is the next best thing to telepathy. It makes up for something we lack in nature: the ability to truly feel what it is like to be another person. Sympathy aside, everything I experience, I ultimately experience alone. This will always be true. No one else will ever literally feel my pain, my bliss,

My short story “The Age of Erring” would not behave. I had ordered it to be a short story, but it tried to become a novel. I wrote at least 50 pages with no end in sight until I realized that the story was mushrooming out of my control. To contain the explosion, I reduced

In everyday conversation, when someone asks you to describe someone you know, you probably do not say, “She has a penetrating gaze, pale, delicate fingers, and a regal posture.” What do you say? You probably tell whether a person is short or tall, young or old, skinny or overweight. You might tell the color and

I used to write my novels defensively. I was terrified of there being any page where the reader might possibly be confused at any moment, so I would try to cram in as many explanations in as short of a space as possible: my terminology, the history of my world, cultural idiosyncrasies, and geography, for

A famous quote of advice by author Stephen King is “Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little heart, kill your darlings.” In other words, cut passages of writing, even the ones you love, if cutting them benefits the story as a whole. Cutting superfluous text can help writers achieve a leaner, more

When I first began writing fiction, my characters tended to be too passive. Horrible things happened to them, but they never knew exactly what to do. When they did react, they reacted too little. A student in my college creative writing class had the same problem. His story began with a father losing his toddler

A common complaint about novels is “too many descriptions.” As a reader I have made the same complaint in cases where I was eager to see what happened next in a story, only to end up entangled in a painfully detailed description of some bucolic farm setting. Question: Please, tell me, does the baby whose

Before social media, whenever I would get home from school, I would be all done with socializing for the day. The world was outside my door and all I had to do was lock it for my privacy to be secured – not just physically but mentally. Indoors there was a feeling of safety and