Elves and Imagery
Your high school English classes probably left you somewhat suspicious of all talk of imagery and I don’t blame you. I have memories of having poems and stories dissected in front of my eyes by my own teachers. Often it was like being present at a surgical operation where the patient died on the table while the surgeon pulled out his internal organs and explained their function. All of which rather misses the point. Imagery is an integral part of story and its purpose is very simple. It reminds readers in a subliminal fashion of the ideas that the writer Read more…
Writing the Tie-In Novel: Structure
So how do you go about writing a novel then? Well, I don’t know how you do it but here’s how I go about it. I start by writing a very simple synopsis. This can be anything up to 1000 words. It covers the basic flow of the action, names the main characters and settings. That’s it. There’s no description, no dialogue, no bits of business of any sort. It’s just the bare bones of the story set down in the most basic way. Once that is done, I go through this very basic outline and I start expanding upon Read more…
Revising Macharius
This is the part I always enjoy. The grunt work of writing the first draft is out of the way and I am now going through The Angel of Fire in Scrivener with an eye to improving it. I took a short break away from the book last week so I could come to it cold for the rewrite. In an ideal world this interval would be longer than a week, but even that small amount of time has given me some distance. Since it’s been several months since I wrote the earliest parts of the book, I have plenty of Read more…
Writing the Warhammer Tie-in: Details
When I am writing a tie-in novel I try never to assume that the reader is familiar with the background. This sounds strange, I know. After all, the developers have spent years building the world, the artists have provided us with beautiful illustrations so we know what everything looks like and hey, players have spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours enjoying the game. They know what an ork or Chaos Warrior looks like, don’t they? They may have read dozens of Warhammer novels already. It’s a fair assumption that someone picking up a Warhammer novel is going to be a Read more…
The Arithmetic of Writing
If you’ve read many of the posts on this site, you already know what I’ve been doing today. I’ve been taking stock of the month that just passed and I have been deciding what I need to do this month. At the start of each month I’ll note what actually got written as opposed to what I said I would write at the start of last month. If the targets were not met, I will try and work out why and do better in the coming month. I spend a lot of time on this sort of thing. I believe Read more…
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