Posts on Writing and Craft

Getting Started

• On writing fiction: rules of thumb (an overview)
• The unbearable lightness of the blank page
• Essential traits for writers
• Story or plot:  Finding your way
  • The story arc 
  • Conflict: The little engine that must; Or, Interviewing Cindy
  • Let’s not forget her prince: interviewing what’s-his name?
  • Plots 7, 20, 56
  • Twisty plots
• The Trifecta of storytelling: The whole pie

Nuts and Bolts

• language, speech and dialogue
  • try your hand at snappy dialogue
  • playfulness
  • on internal monologue
  • writing dialect
  • uncle peter’s eloquence
  • tricks of the trade
  • more dialect in dialog
  • summary: dialect in dialogue
  • the reading, and the unsaid.
  • a laughing matter
  • said, the undead
• reading and writing male characters
• race, characterization, and historical fiction
• prompt: i see you
• pov: the unreliable narrator
• narrative voice and breaking through the fourth wall
• overheard at the post office
• on the subject of heroes and heroines
• letting the characters lead where they may
• historical v. political considerations
• give your readers some credit
• falling in love
• drew chial on characterization
• digging down to conflict
• dealing with a creepy character
• cinderella revisited: the prince speaks
• character names & keeping things straight
• believable heroes, and the construction thereof
• anachronistic heroes

Pierre Georges Jeanniot 1897

The art and craft of writing sex scenes

This is a series of posts on various aspects of writing scenes with sexual content.

1. Humor: Funny Sex
2. Lyricism
3. NC-17
4. Less; More
5. Where Things Go Wrong
6. Where Things Go Wrong(er)
7. A Kiss is Rarely Just a Kiss
8. Reader Feedback: On Writing Sex Scenes
9. Falling in Love
10. Good Bad Sex
11. More Good Bad Sex
12. Reader Responses to Sex Scenes
13. fools and angels treading: sensitive subjects in fiction
14. G or PG or Nothing: Unhappy Readers
15. Stream of (Sexual) Consciousness
16. playfulness