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How to Write Your First Book

January 25, 2021

Writing your first novel is a big deal. If you pardon the ridiculous metaphor, writing your first novel is not unlike the first time you slept with someone: It’s exciting, scary, fascinating, and – looking back – kind of special yet also pretty “meh”. The trick in learning how to write your first book lies in understanding what to expect.

But there’s more.

To continue the same symbolism, just as a new partner makes it feel like the very first time all over again, you might have written ten books, but you can still get the “writing my first book” experience all of a sudden. In other words, even if you have already written at least one book, this post applies to you too.

Drawing from my own long and sometimes painful experience, in this post I will give you some simple but useful tips on how to write your first book of fiction – whether it’s your literal first or the first book in a new beginning you want to be making.

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Concept Fiction: a How-to Guide for Intelligent Narratives

August 11, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

concept, creativity, fiction, genre, imagination, literary fiction, narrative, writing

By “concept”, we usually refer to an abstract theme, topic, or group of ideas. And so, in this context, concept fiction refers to writing that is not plot-based but rather themed-based.

In some way, this might make you think that concept fiction is a matter of genre, but this is not entirely accurate. True, most e.g. crime fiction is plot-based (whereas literary fiction isn’t), but there is an important difference.

Whereas the idea of genre fiction (or of literary fiction) informs the aesthetics and form of the narrative – that is, what it looks like – concept fiction refers to the process itself: how to write the narrative.

Of course, having a different methodology of writing directly affects the outcome – and so, to some extent, the aesthetics. This means that:

although concept fiction is applicable to any genre (or literary fiction, or experimental fiction), it does somewhat blur the established borders between genres and can destabilize its own position in the literary category.
it’s an invaluable tool of imagination and creativity.

Especially if you’re a genre writer, the first element above might sound like something bad. It isn’t, but it also depends on your priorities. We’ll get back to this later in the post. For now, a simpler way of putting it would be this: “Concept fiction helps your work stand out from the vast crowd of mediocre works”.

Much better, isn’t it?

In this post we’ll take a closer look at all these elements, and see how writing concept fiction can help you produce intelligent narratives that are cohesive, symbolically rich, and intriguingly original.

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Why Imagination and Creativity Are not the Same (and why It Matters)

June 30, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

creativity, fiction, imagination, memory, writing

In writing, is imagination the same as creativity? If the answer were “yes”, this post wouldn’t exist. But imagination and creativity are two very different concepts, as we’ll see in more detail, and confusing them can have far-reaching repercussions in your writing.

Indeed, it’s particularly in the field of creative writing that confusing imagination and creativity can be damaging.

Imagination versus creativity. Creativity versus imagination.

Even the order is important, and so in this post I’ll refer to the pair as “imagination and creativity”. The reason? One of the major differences between these two concepts is their temporal order. Imagination comes first and creativity follows, in a different form.

But, as usual, the story doesn’t end with that; it only begins there!

imagination vs creativity in writing — **Imagination** is wanting to take a photo of a woman in a forest; **creativity** is deciding what the photo should look like

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