Sex and violence are visceral activites, but so is eating. Food is at once primitive and sophisticated, animalistic and human. We need to eat, but to a great extent we get to choose what we eat. And we get to choose for our characters. In fact, the characters of our characters lie in that choice. […]
Books on how to write dialogue often suggest we listen to people talk. Sounds like good advice, but have you ever truly listened? “We . . . um . . . we, like . . . you know . . . we stammer and like we repeat ourselves and um . . . you know.” […]
Raymond Chandler used to claim that a writer had to get a million words of crap out of their system before they got to the good stuff. That’s probably not always true, but he has a point. Writing is a profession, and a demanding one. Very few people can sit down and pilot a plane […]
I just finished taking a look at two thrillers, both big, slick, well-touted works. Although they had interesting plots, there were so many point-of-view characters and so many incidents that the stories never seemed to go anywhere. I finally got tired of the words yip-yip-yipping at me and closed the books. Ahh. Silence. Three-hundred-page manuscripts […]
This one isn’t about writing or the good I see every day in so many people. This one’s about people without integrity, about people who can’t be trusted to do what’s right without someone having to stand watch over them.
The only writer worse than one who falls back on clichés is one who prefaces the cliché with “proverbial.” That construct has been used so often it has become a cliché in itself. Even worse, it draws attention to the writer. It says that the writer is too lazy to come up with something original, […]
