Category Archives: Writing
Watch Closer?
A friend of mine, who is also both a writer and an actor, wrote this piece about people-watching over on her blog the other day. In it she describes the people she saw at a local coffee shop one afternoon. She mentioned how useful such a practice can be for both the writer and the …
Fiction Is Stranger than Truth?
Is fiction really that much more dramatic or convenient than real life? That is the consensus and I can’t deny that at first blush it makes sense to say so. After all, how often do we find our lives, or even our day unfolding in such a linear, logical, dramatic manner as found in a …
Writers Make the Worst Readers?
In order to be a good writer, you must be a good reader. There are what, about a billion ways of saying that? The concept is mentioned in what, 99.8% of every collection of advice for writers ever assembled? Something like that. And we know why this counsel is so ubiquitous; it is true. A writer …
Feeling Conflicted
A lot is said about the importance of conflict in fiction. (Sometimes it’s stressed even in the non-fiction work I write, but that’s another post.) Without conflict, so goes the admonition, there is no story. Or at least no story that anybody will read. Therefore, (the conventional advice continues), an author must put their characters …
The Name Game
In 90% of the cases, I don’t stress much about the names of characters in my fiction. That isn’t to say that names don’t matter to me, because they do, quite a bit. They have to “fit”. Yet I have read war-stories from authors who sometimes spend a month or more of the writing/editing process …
Ty Unglebower 