This is quite the meta-post: I’ll be offering you advice on how to successfully get writing advice. More maddeningly, perhaps, I’ll be partly asking you to ignore writing advice – advice which you’d have to ignore in order… not to ignore it. There are no simple answers, sorry!
Overall, what this little linguistic and conceptual wizardry underlines is:
Crucially, a certain level of critical thinking is required in order to know what advice to follow.
This latter part is what I’ll be focusing on in this post. I’ll offer you tools that will help you know what to do so that you get writing advice successfully. That is, what to do so that any writing advice you’re getting is actually helping you instead of misleading you.
Writing fiction is not about fact; it’s about affect. Which means, there are only opinions, not objective truth. Thus, when you seek writing advice, you basically only seek opinions(more…)
I’ll try to make this post as detailed and useful, but at the same time as accessible as possible. Personally, I’m a great fan of simplicity. I believe that if you can’t explain a concept – no matter how complex – in a way a 10-year-old could understand it, it means you haven’t fully understood it yourself.
With this in mind, here’s a quick outline of what I’ll show you in this post:
How to write fantasy fiction characters. In particular, what is the role of characters in fantasy fiction
Examples of tropes. That’s a somewhat fancy way of saying how to write fantasy fiction in a way your intended audience can relate to it. In a sense, it’s a marketing consideration, but also with artistic dimensions.
What kind of fantasy fiction plots are worth pursuing and what are best left alone. And why.
I don’t have all the answers. Heck, I don’t even have all the questions. But whatever I know and share with you, I genuinely hope it can help you!
One misconception about how to write fantasy fiction is that fantasy allows you to write pretty much anything you want. Technically true, practically false(more…)
Not counting a collection of short stories I recently wrote, The Perfect Gray is my most recent literary work. It’s a literary-fiction novel dealing with concepts such as conflicting emotions, empowerment, impossible choices, and risks. The book’s protagonist, Hecate, is basically carried through life like seaweed on the surf, coming and going without a destination of her own, until she meets a strange man. But what does all this have to do with books and music?
More still, as the subtitle reveals, why did I bother making a post-rock album for The Perfect Gray?
The quick answer is, because I wanted. The more elaborate answer is, because art is complex.
This is the cover of Hecate’s Dream, the post-rock album inspired by The Perfect Gray(more…)
