- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- January 2007
- November 2006
- October 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
Discovering Character Secrets from Your Relatives!
Much of the time, we treat relatives as obligations: “Yeah, but what can you do? He’s family.”
This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles and first and second cousins reside. And while I was there, I finally understood why Brothers and Sisters makes me laugh.
But the biggest epiphany I had… (Read more…)
The Most Important Story Element
In the beginning, I was a software developer, not a writer. And if you’ve read any open-source documentation, you know how badly software developers write. So you know how wide a chasm I had to jump if I wanted to learn how to write fiction.
The fiction bug first bit me in 2002, when I had an inspiration for an idea I wanted to write about, and I knew I had to explore the idea from within a story, because it was the only way to make the words personal, concrete, not just to explore an abstract idea. So I sat down to pen the great American novel… (Read more…)
