“In my life there are many silences,” wrote the novelist Juan Rulfo, “and in my writing, too.” It’s important to think about how your story uses silence. Most of the craft of writing focuses on all the noise — the dialogue, the cacophony of the senses, the action. But silence is not just an absence, […]
What exactly is ‘timeless’ fiction? In essence, it’s a piece of work that withstands the passing of years, even decades, maintaining its relevancy and charm. The danger is that your fiction won’t age well, and in 10 years certain references will make readers scratch their heads, either bewildered or feeling like your book is dated. […]
Any time some well-intentioned writer tells you, “You can’t do that” in your story, please send them this article. Because this article celebrates breaking the rules! Here are more than sixteen writers who deliberately break the rules of narrative to make their book better. The twenty writers below gleefully and blatantly shatter the most fundamental […]
There’s nothing fancy about a list. Lists are the vanilla flavor of fiction, the most basic tool the writer can have in their toolbox. It’s the simplest way to organize information — no fancy frills, no tricks, no complexity. What you see is what you get. 1, 2, 3. A, B, C. Yet in its […]
One of the best ways to learn how to write is to learn by imitation. So if you want to write a fight scene, you should look at writers who have come before you. Below are a variety of fight scenes: some just with fists, some with weapons like swords, spears, and knives. All of […]
It’s time to write a big fight scene in your novel, but you don’t want to botch it. That’s understandable. I’ve read enough badly written fight scenes to know that it’s truly easy to write a boring, predictable fight scene with nothing at stake, where the reader doesn’t even care who wins by the end. […]
Everyone tells you to write scenes. To show, not tell. But what if that was … bad advice? Or at least limiting advice, because virtually every great book in history uses summary and “telling” in at least a few places in the book. And surprisingly, some books use summary for MOST of the book. And […]
When one of your characters is on drugs, you want to accurately portray the thoughts, actions, and speech of what someone would say on such a drug. But some of you might not want to take Ecstasy or Cocaine or Toad Venom in the course of your casual “writing research.” This post will rescue you! […]
Smell is the best sense to use in your writing. Yes: it’s better than sound, better than sight, better than touch. There’s something about smell that bypasses all of the normal roadblocks in our brain and goes straight to memory and animal instincts. It’s primitive. It’s elemental. If you want to really immerse a reader […]
It’s easy to hate dream sequences in a novel. I mean, how many bad dreams sequences have you read? I’ve read a ton, and that’s why for so long I was resistant to teach other writers how to use dreams, and refused to use them in my fiction. But after continuing to see dreams in […]
