This Paying Attention to… series on writing fiction concentrates, for the most part, on what to do when writing. More exactly, it covers things I need to remind myself to pay attention to — particularly as I’ve been working on Seems to Fit. In this post, I want to look at what to when not [...]

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon. I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. [...]

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I may never have to master anything more difficult than thinking, and thinking convincingly, like multiple characters. It’s not just a matter of the word choices and rhythms of their dialogue (although it includes that). And it’s not just a matter of the outward manifestations of their natures — gender, style of dress, and so [...]

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“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism. The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of [...]

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[Image: "Marshmallow Gun" (excerpt) -- click for full original at xkcd.] I realized a couple days ago — during this criminally busy week — that I hadn’t posted any writing samples in a long time. Many of the (non-blogging) pieces I’ve posted on RAMH are grouped together under the category called “Paying Attention.” But I [...]

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I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”— But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has to” do almost anything, much less experience the sort of off-the-wall moment I did one afternoon, years ago. And even less [...]

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When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all. That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but [...]

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When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write. Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother [...]

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I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then. Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it [...]

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I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox. But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to [...]

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