Category: Books!

In general, obsessively returning to fiddle with a story isn’t a great idea. No story is ever perfect, but there comes a time when the best thing is to say that it’s good enough. When the amount of time you’re spending on it outweighs the improvements. When you’re not...

Fantasy authors get to do something that few other genres offer. We get to create our own world. There are probably as many ways of doing it as there are fantasy authors, but there are certain common questions that are worth considering before you launch into your epic task....

Generally speaking, I don’t do bizarre worlds. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate worlds that are carried through space by a turtle, or whose inhabitants are giant insects. Occasionally, I even create a bizarre setting for an individual short story. My main secondary world, though, is very much in...

Most scenes in a story consist of people having a conversation, in one way or another. Or fighting, of course, which is bizarrely similar. Even if there’s only one character in the scene, the chances are they’re thinking — and that’s communication of a kind. This is fine, but...

As I highlighted in a recent post, the writers’ group I belong to, Fantasy-Writers.org, is about to publish an anthology of members’ stories. This is Quest: 22 Stories of the Hero’s Journey. To whet your appetite, this is an interview with David Staiger, one of the seventeen authors represented...

There have been a few moments in my writing life that have changed everything. One was a long walk I took the family dog on when I was fifteen, in the course of which I thought up and planned a story which proved to be the germ for much...

There’s a very clear traditional idea of what a fantasy world is supposed to be like. It has warriors riding horses and wielding swords and axes. It doesn’t have them travelling on planes and operating computers. It just doesn’t. But why not? After all, our world has had all...

Back in the 1970s, after reading Lord of the Rings had changed my world, I naturally went looking for similar books. Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series proved invaluable, not only for the old classics they reprinted, but also for the many other authors and series Carter...

Like a pinball, your story bounces around in your head, hitting your occipital lobe, hippocampus, and the front of your brain, lighting them all up with the act of creation. If you are a master writer, you light up the caudate nucleus, which handles skills gained over time. Creating...