Characters in novels have lives. Long lives. Lives outside of everything we’ve ever written or plan to write. How do you keep all that in check when developing a world? When I wrote my first few novels (some of which have been published, others hidden deep in the drawer of “to be rewritten later”), I…
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There have been, at different times in my life, three or four or even five different novel ideas competing for attention–all out of focus. In March 2006, I tried to analyze how to deal with this mess. The following is a post I made on my original blog (with some tense changes here and there). …
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The outline of a novel is a personal thing. When I was in school, I clearly recall being forced to develop outlines for papers, to include Roman numerals and all. Many of you probably did this, as well. You know the drill: I. Introduction II. First Important Thing A. First point of the important thing…
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When I was wee lad (well, thirty-something), I had this idea I would be the next great horror writer. I did all things horror: wrote short stories, worked on novels, edited a horror magazine, read works by other horror authors, attempted to buy my way into horror conventions, collected horror action figures (they’re not dolls!),…
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I have been looking through various works-in-progress, those novels that–for whatever reason–were abandoned on the side of the road while the mind went looking for a gas station down the street. One of them, Driving the Spike, made me think of two of my favorite reads: Stephen Crane and Japanese Death Poems, as presented in a…
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In the world of art (and I’m speaking specifically of painting), the word pentimento (derived from the Italian pentirsi, which means to repent or change your mind) is a change made by the artist during the process of painting. As a painter, I’ve done this many times, although the discovering of the change or changes…
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This is an old blog post, written in 2005 or 2006. I’m only reposting it here because I think the message is clear: it’s possible to change your habits when you’re ready to change your habits. It’s also interesting to see where I was in my writing career at various points in time. I’ve been…
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A book takes times, does it not? On September 23, 2013, Difficult Mirrors was released for consumption (and hopefully joy). That the book took a while to write is not a secret I keep. Journeys are not always quick nor do they always take a straight route. It even had a different name for nearly…
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Voices. Voices everywhere. What I consider to be the hardest part of starting a novel is not technical, exactly. It’s not the outlining or the descriptive note cards I might have scattered about the bedroom like so much detritus nor the initial formatting of the manuscript (which I’ve since learned is just foolish at the…
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In 2002 (or so), a writer friend (the-great-and-not-quite-as-unknown-as-me Eric A. Jackson) and I were discussing what makes good fiction. At the time, he had recently loaned me a copy of Bentley Little’s The Collection, a great book of short stories. One of those stories included a dead llama. Naturally, the discussion on what made good…
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