Your writing is valuable. Your time, your words and your skill have gone into honing a story, and that story is worth something.
Getting published is hard. There are a lot of unpublished authors in this world, and only so many paying markets. This gives publishers a lot of power. They can ask for … Read more
A pun is not a premise; it is a pun. A twist ending is not a premise. A punchline is not a premise unless your story is very, very short.
Premise, for all the things it is not, is difficult to define. It is not like characters, who are the people who walk around … Read more
It seems like titles should be a reward. After the long struggle of making a story that is acceptable to all eyes including your own, the title should be the cherry on top of the most magnificent ice cream sundae of all time.
Titling, however, often seems more difficult than finding a perfect magical … Read more
Stylized writing is something everyone wants to try, once or twice. Things like intensely tonal writing, insane temporal structures, and iambic pentameter sometimes are unique choices that add pop and interest to a story. Sometimes there’s only one way to tell a particular story, and that’s with eight simultaneous first person narrators. (If that is … Read more
I’m writing a blog post in first person present tense. For a blog post, first person present is a pretty easy choice. I’m the narrator, I’m the main character, I’m talking directly to a reader. No intervening characters will be jumping into the mix, unless I very quickly develop dissociative identity disorder. (That seems unlikely.) … Read more
At Alpha this year I gave a presentation on the intersection of science and writing, with handy tips for how to do science right brilliantly and wrong elegantly. A significant portion of it was conducted in enthusiastic mime, which is sadly lost with the transition to text, but I hope that with some imagination you … Read more
