There’s an old, worn-out adage about writing: Write what you know. Which is fine if you’re writing about the day-to-day life of Earth, but what if you want to write about a world you don’t know? Today, we’re talking with science fiction author Mike Van Horn about world building and immersing your readers in that world.
Almost any genre you might write in will include some kind of action scene, so it makes sense to learn how to do action well. Action does not always mean a car chase or a shootout, though these are time-honored examples. An action scene can simply be a place in the story where the pacing increases and the movement is external, rather than internal.
Writing fiction with paranormal elements can be tricky, especially in a modern setting. You want your readers to suspend their disbelief and just go with the story. You don’t want them to roll their eyes because the concept of your paranormal world is too far-fetched. Today we’re talking with paranormal romance writer M MacKinnon to get her take on writing paranormal fiction.
Have you ever come across a line of poetry that was so clear, you could taste the description as you read it? Or a paragraph in a novel that made your skin tingle from the tangibility of it? That kind of vivid description is powerful and hard to capture, but I’ve found that there is one key trick to help you get started.
How many times have you heard someone say a character in a movie or book felt “flat” or cliché? As writers, we want to create strong characters our readers will fall in love with. We don’t want readers to be bored or roll their eyes at the people we’ve created. Today we’re talking with romance author Callie Sutcliffe on how to develop characters readers care about.
Writers are imitators. At its heart, our job is to watch the world, listen to it, feel it, and then reproduce it using the tools of language.
That is why we tend to “write what we know.” Human beings are built for input, and what we put into our minds likely comes out in our writing.
That is why it’s important to choose our reading carefully. Choose the right literature and you’ll be infinitely inspired to create wonderful work.
