Here is John Cleese, the funniest guy from Monty Python IMO, explaining how he analyzed his creative process, and what it needs to flourish. The two main points he makes are that you need boundaries of time and boundaries of space. Basically, this means you need to separate yourself from the world for an hour …
In “On Writing”, Stephen King talks about discovering the story as akin to uncovering a fossil. You brush away a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, not quite knowing what you have until you’ve unearthed the whole thing. And you shouldn’t try to discern …
Tokyo Zero by Mark Horne(unfinished) This was the last of my free ones I gleaned from, I think, Scribd. I searched for top 10 free eBooks. I’m not sure if I ever finished any of them. You get what you pay for. This one was no different. It never gets to the plot. It has …
I recently came upon a conflict in my novel between the writer and the story. The story wanted to get rid of an extraneous bit of narrative that was no more than political editorial. The writer saw the soundness of this in the first part, but the second part made him want to put it …
Another emotional setback yesterday. You know? Those times I get every month and a half or so where I get morose and start saying “I shouldn’t be a writer. There’s no way I’ll be as good as them. I’m so unproductive. My work is shit. I’m wasting my time.” And so on. This was prompted …
Have a writing room. It should be a humble room. This comes from Stephen King. He says that during his amateur years, he imagined having a ginormous T. Rex desk that he could write in. It was placed in an addition to the house, a converted garage. No more days of a student’s desk in …
Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. I find this true of many books. They only put down the barest essentials of the description necessary to get a picture in the mind’s eye. I have no idea what the interior of the spaceship in Star Dragon looks like, not even the colors of …
Writing’s a lot like programming (I don’t think this is the first time I’ve equated this, and if it is, it won’t be the last). Sometime’s you’re confronted with a problem. You want a character or characters to get to a certain point. You know vaguely how they get there, but writing doesn’t work in …
Start as close to the end as possible. In some stories I see this, and this makes it feel as if the story is just one big climax. Good Omens is like that. The Running Man felt like that. The Uglies trilogy feels like that. Some don’t exactly feel like that, but the majority of …
Pay attention to how real people around you act. I think this one speaks for itself, and we all know why. We cannot write impossible characters. This is what I call the Superman effect. Superman is basically the perfect man. Strength, speed, and heroism up the yin-yang. He’s always noble, he always does what’s right. …