Where do you get your ideas from, Mr. Preston The most difficult question a writer is asked is this: Where do you get your ideas? It is by and large unanswerable, as the ideas seem to come unbidden and unlooked for out of some dark and mysterious inglenook of the mind. But in the […]
Category Archives: Writing Tips
Eight Great Books About Writing
My 8 Favorite Books on Writing Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain It was written all the way back in 1974, but this is my favorite book on the list. So much good advice in here, but the best is: Move a story along quickly by making sure you have two […]
The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received…
The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received… The best piece of advice I ever received as an author was: You have the power to change it. I’m going back a few years now, but it made me realize the words I’d sweated over, though possibly written in blood, weren’t cast in stone. I could reel […]
Writing Suspense Like Alfred Hitchcock
Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, Tony Lee Moral, offers some advice for aspiring suspense writers as he breaks down a few key techniques for writing suspense like Alfred Hitchcock. What suspense techniques did Hitchcock use that are applicable for fiction writers? Hitchcock gave the audience more information than the character to […]
Can Good Writing Be Taught?
To celebrate the release of her newest novel, Last Night, Karen Ellis reflects on what makes great fiction writing and how to discover and unleash the voice within. It’s an old question and generally the answer is “No.” And yet I’ve been teaching creative writing for twenty-five years—teaching, or leading, workshops in basic fiction writing, suspense, […]
A True Event Can Make Riveting Fiction
A True Event Can Make Riveting Fiction Glen David Gold’s novel Carter Beats the Devil (2001) opens with President Warren G. Harding gamely getting up on stage in a San Francisco theater to participate in a conjuring trick. Hours later, he’s dead. Were the two events connected? Suddenly the conjurer—the real-life Joseph Carter, a household name in […]
How do they do it? The Literary Masters of Suspense and Their Secrets
How do they do it? The Literary Masters of Suspense As a mid-career novelist, I am attempting to forge fiction that is a hybrid of the literary and mystery and suspense genres. And I have my role models, novelists whose work while suspenseful, also showcase in-depth characterization as well as consistently elegant and thought-provoking sentences […]
Dark Obsessions: Finding Inspiration in My Favorite (Unwatched) Horror Films
Dark Obsessions: Finding Inspiration in My Favorite (Unwatched) Horror Films Sometimes the idea for book is born out of a newspaper article I skim in an airport. Sometimes it comes from witnessing a friend’s nasty divorce. And sometimes it lurches to life when I ask a friend too many questions about an article in […]
The Five Don’ts of Writing
The Five Don’ts of Writing Most of us have mulled over the myriad articles on ways to improve our writing, searching for that nugget of advice that will elevate our craft from mundane to marvelous. How many times have you clicked on that kind of article or stopped at the magazine page to see […]
Where’s the body? The importance of a corpse to a crime writer…
Where’s the body? The importance of a corpse to a crime writer… I’ve been talking to audiences about murder for a number of years now. As a result, I’m uncomfortably aware that a high percentage of perfectly ordinary people have thought about committing murder—and some have a specific victim in mind. The stories I […]
Fiction Writing from A to Z
Do you know your fiction writing ABCs? Fiction Writing from A to Z Reminders about our craft make our imaginations burst into creative mode. From A to Z, we find sources of inspiration to keep us writing. I’ve chosen the first word that entered my mind for each letter as a means to keep […]
Four Crime Genres, Four Techniques to get you that Contract!
Four Crime Genres, Four Techniques to get you that Contract! Psychological suspense, thrillers, horror, and mystery are popular subjects for a lot of genre writers. Yet all writers are already intimately familiar with these topics; so much of a writer’s life is an everyday encounter with most if not all of them. Supernatural self-belief, […]