Should a Writer be a Literary Critic?
Writers can benefit from understanding literary criticism, but as with everything else it has a cost. Writing well requires understanding.…
Author: Kyle (page 7)
Writing as Habit
Writing as a habit is critical to success: it lets you form a lasting relationship with your work process that can yield rewards in output and satisfaction.
Serum (Part 4)
“We have to go!”
I grab Gray and pull her by the straps of her pack. The carbine sways off-target and sends a bullet into a boarded up storefront. She swears at me.
We made it into an alley before whoever was shooting at us got a second chance.
A Metahuman Theory of Literature
Hypothesis: Literature serves to address questions of beyond human scope. From this I derive the term metahuman: the Greek term…
Markets, Styles, and Genres
Writers who want to publish books often overlook a critical step of the publishing process. Everyone is familiar with books,…
Serum (Part 3)
“Contact.” The words come out hot, louder than I mean for them to, even though they’re a hissed whisper. Gray’s…
Respect Your Audience by Dumbing Down
Good writing is clear writing. A mistake common to authors is the idea that complicated ideas require complicated presentation. That…
Nonlinear Narratives and You
I’ve been talking about my bubble method of doing organization for a while now, but today I want to talk about something that’s useful for creative writers: nonlinearity.
Nonlinear stories can hold a lot of interest and have some practical advantages. It puts the storyteller entirely in control of pacing and the flow of information.
But it’s also difficult. The storyteller needs to be great at information control and keeping tones steady.
Serum (Part 2)
“You hear that?” I thought she was just trying to get my mind off what she’d done, but I stopped…
Choosing a Subject: Resolution
The resolution of a work is critical for its success.
The theme and message of the work need to carry through to the end of a story. Even for fiction writers who focus on mere entertainment, a resolution provides satisfaction to the audience.
Without a resolution, a story feels incomplete, and that’s undesirable in all but very specific circumstances.
This is the fourth part of my series on how to narrow down subjects for writing (see the rest through this link).