I’m a devoted listener to the podcast Writing Excuses — despite their claims to the contrary, they really are that smart — and found their most recent episode, on Middle Grade fiction, to be fascinating. (Defining Middle Grade is contentious, but loosely, it’s fiction for kids 9-12: think Charlotte’s Web, the first Harry Potter book, […]
2011 has been an exciting year for me as a writer. I had my first fiction sale, my first podcast sale, and went to my first convention (Boskone). I won a Codex contest, and did respectably well in another. I signed my first autographs, at Readercon. I bought way too many fountain pens. In terms […]
Over on Whatever, John Scalzi pokes a little fun at the folks who (are? profess to be?) thrown out of the Lord of the Rings by the viscosity of the lava in Mount Doom. He makes an excellent point that the suspension of disbelief is a highly personal thing, subject to much head-scratching by observers […]
Early on after I started writing again, I joined an online critique group, Critters. I got a lot of good feedback from it, but only one critique was so good that I still remember it more than a year later. It was from a pro writer who correctly pointed out that the story wasn’t really […]
I had wanted to put up a thread earlier for my story The Body and the Bomb, published back in April by Crossed Genres, but I don’t think that page is the appropriate place for me to put my thoughts about the story — I don’t entirely subscribe to the “death of the author” or […]
Just about every writer has heard the advice, “Kill your darlings” (and if you haven’t, you just did). The advice has come to have an almost mythic quality to it. Hell, someone even titled a movie about a writer after it. The “kill your darlings” formulation apparently comes from Faulkner (who graciously specified that this […]
Distillation of spirits is a wonderful process in which one starts with an alcoholic liquid and proceeds to remove as much of the water as possible in order to concentrate the alcohol and flavors. This is made possible by the fact that different liquids have different boiling and freezing points. The simplest method for doing […]
I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative process from a practical point of view, but not much thinking about the nature of creativity itself. So, I was intrigued when I came upon a reference to Graham Wallas’s Stages of Creativity. (quoting Wikipedia here) (i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the […]
This will be a short one, I think. In the broader subject of rhetoric, there are five canons, one of which is the systematic search for argument, the Inventio. The subject of stasis, which I discussed last time, comes out of the Inventio. So does the subject of ethos, which I’ll talk about today. These two […]
(If you missed the previous parts, you can start here. Go on, I’ll wait for you. ETA: This post actually stands on its own quite well. Feel free to read this one first then go back, I think you won’t be confused.) This is a long one, but I think important. There are two large […]
John P. Murphy 