Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Cold Cases: Thinking Out Loud

Okay, to start with, Michael Moorcock talks about the genesis of the Dorian Hawkmoon books over at the Tor site. I mean, seriously, why are you still here? Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s.  I totally dig the idea of this anthology, but I’ll admit that all of my initial ideas will be bloody hard to pare down to short story lengths (unless, of course, I finally break down and write the 1920’s zombie story set in Tahiti I’ve been threatening to write for four years now, but Alisa at TPP is quite adamant in her hatred of zombies so it’s probably not the best starting point). ♦ Okay, fair warning, the following entry is rambling and scattered while I think through a specific problem related to the project du jour. If you have no real interest in writers thinking out loud, I suggest going

PeterMBall 26/03/2010
Works in Progress

Some Awesomeness, Some Writing Advice, Some Help Needed, and Some Horn Spotting

1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here. 2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on

PeterMBall 04/09/2009
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Links and Things

1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there). 2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book This amuses me in its accuracy. 3) Reviewage andPimpage – My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco – and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf – The Fix diggs my

PeterMBall 19/08/2009
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Some Ideas About Ideas

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one

PeterMBall 05/08/2009
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Because PIL had it right

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs. So today I’m giving in

PeterMBall 21/04/2009