As I said on Monday in a lengthy introduction: it’s impossible for an author to remove themselves completely from their own work. No matter what you do, you’re going to bleed into it and people are going to be able to see what you think and feel about subjects through how you portray them in the things you’ve written.

Sometimes it can be incredibly subtle, left up for interpretation throughout the ages. But for others it can be painfully obvious. At this point we reach a stage where someone does what we call “soap boxing” or, worse, the dreaded Mary Sue insertion. As much as you want people to know you through your writing, you also want to let them have their own experience and come to their own conclusions. A good writer will have a message and a theme in their work, a great writer will guide the reader into discovering it for themselves.

So how does someone stay true to themselves without overwhelming the work and bogging it down with their own personality?

Continue reading Don’t Kill The Messenger: 4 Tips To Avoid Soap-boxing →

After a couple weeks attempting to convince people to edit and finding out through reduced traffic that no one really wants to do it (could have told myself that one), I have decided it’s time to branch out towards more general writing once more. Reading the work of several aspiring and new writers, I’ve found that one of the big problems with a lot of writing today is how often people strive to meet certain criteria without understanding the criteria.

It’s a problem that haunts many. So today I’m going to tackle a set of character archetypes that it seems almost everyone stumbles on once or twice and try to decipher just why they fail.

Continue reading 5 Character Types People Frequently Screw Up →

So, continuing the trend and closing up the month (as next week it will be December), I am marking another week of NaNoWriMo with a little helpful advice to first time authors who may be taking the first step into the literary world this month. If you’re reading this on some other month, welcome, hope it’s helpful to you too in the far flung future. So far, if you’re late to the show, I’ve covered Mystery and Science-Fiction, two of the genres in my novel series Agent of Argyre. But today it’s time for the third major component to my stories: Fantasy!

But I’m sure at this point you realize how silly it is to give advice on how to create Fantasy stories. The beauty of Fantasy is that there are literally no rules to it. You can do anything you want to do in a Fantasy story so long as you have good storytelling and charming characters. This makes it one of the best genres for a lot of people who are just starting. Still, there is some room for me to be opinionated and throw unsolicited advice your way: How do you keep it fresh?

Fantasy has to be one of, if not the, oldest genres of fiction in human history. Even before the written word we were telling each other fanciful tales around the fire in the late evening hours. Folklore and mythology don’t just influence Fantasy – they were part of it. So it’s daunting for people to take that much history and be able to add their own mark to it. How do we do it?

Continue reading 5 Writing Tips for Original Fantasy →

For a long time I was uncomfortable with the idea of trying to teach anyone about the art of writing. Anyone who reads blogs about writing is often a writer themselves, after all. So what exactly could I teach someone who should have as much or more experience than me?

As a result, I spend most of my time on this blog trying to entice people into the world I’ve created by doing tongue-in-cheek in-universe articles about creatures that wander my world. But today I realized, since this is National Novel Writing Month, a lot of people right here and now are writing their very first novel. Not only that, but I’ve realized after some experience tutoring in screenwriting that not everyone who has had formal education in writing comes away with the same information. There are some things that people miss until experience and experimentation point it out to them. So, given that I’ve written two novels, there just might be something I can show a new writer that they haven’t thought of yet.

So, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I present writing tips today for one of the genres I’ve tackled: Mysteries.

Continue reading Five Tips For Writing A Solid Mystery →