I had to begin not with a fully outlined plot, but with a fully-fleshed person.
Tag: creative writing
Building and Fixing Your Causal Chain
Have you received feedback saying that your characters feel manipulated by the author? If so, you might have a broken causal chain.
Does your Story have a Causal Chain?
Create a sense of the inevitable.
Why Writing the Other is Always Radical (Part I)
Photo by Ali Arif Soydaş on Unsplash Writing the other is an inherently political act, especially when the dominant culture wants to turn the other into a “them.” An “us” is a person of dignity with whom we can empathize and recognize as a human being. An “us” is someone we can relate to and …
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How to Write a Fully-Rounded Adventure Story Protagonist
Are you writing adventure fiction? Samuel Delany has suggestions on how to writer more credible main characters.
Course Offered: Through the Leaf-Mould: Speculative Fiction Writing
Are you an aspiring fantasy and science fiction writer? If so, I have good news! I am teaching a speculative fiction writing workshop at the Thomas More Institute (3405 Atwater Avenue, Montreal) called "Through the Leaf-Mould: Speculative Fiction Writing." You will read selections from speculative fiction authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, …
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My Critters List of the 5 Most Common Weaknesses in Fiction
Ever since I became serious as a freelance editor/proofreader and a participant on Critters.org, the oldest online writer's critique group, I have encountered the same weakness in fiction over and over again. Partly, I think this is because people send early drafts to critiques and forego revision until they receive their first round of feedback. …
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How T.E. Lawrence Came to Many-Pillared Iram
Today's post is another YouTube video, in which you will get to listen to my own reading of a piece of short fiction I wrote for the Mythgard Institute "Almost an Inkling" creative writing contest. The contest is still going on, but now that the current week's voting is over, I was really enthusiastic to share this …
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5 Reasons Why Christopher Marlowe is an Elizabethan Hipster Poet
Elizabethan England's most celebrated poet and playwright, in underground kind of way, was Christopher Marlowe, although he was soon eclipsed by Mr. Will Shakespeare, whose popular plays would define the mainstream for centuries to come. It was the 90s. The 1590s to be precise. Marlowe was at the height of his powers, writing the politically …
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Elegant Eliminations
An elimination is a poetic form where you don't write the words. You erase them. Take any stanza or paragraph with a rich, evocative vocabulary. I for example chose a few pages from James Frazer's classic work of anthropology The Golden Bough. Any other kind of text can fit just as well as any other--the …
Matthew Rettino 