Five Ways
Subscribe to my newsletter and get a free story!
Share this:

Recent Writing Post Roundup

Writing and Novel Links
Writing and Novel Links
Most of the revision and rewriting stuff has to do with the novel I’m currently working on. Hopefully, though, this is of use to those writing short stories as well as novels. Please let me know which you liked best, and if there’s writing topics you’d like to see touched on in coming weeks!

Why Titles Matter
5 Things to Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
Three Strategies For Snaring The Senses
Foreshadowing and Establishing Conflict
Active Verbs
Revising Through a Single Lens

5 Responses

  1. Five Things to Do in Your First Three Paragraphs was fantastic.

    I would like to see a post on how to plot short stories, and how to keep control over the story in a way that suits the intended length, etc. Plot arc and narrative scope are things I sort of “feel my way through,” and I’d like to be more tidy about it.

  2. “5 things” was my favorite of the recent posts. I’ll use it every time I’m going over my finished draft to be sure I have all of those covered. Thank you!

    I agree with the first comment. I’d really like to see something about plotting and narrative scope as well. I also appreciated the exercise you did with the first sentences, and wouldn’t mind more exercises if you had others. Really my favorite part of your posts is that you use such good examples and easily explain why they work and how novices can aim for that level of skill. I’m sure I’ll find any topic useful if you write about it in the same instructional way.

    Thanks again for posting these!

    1. I think it’s important to use examples to show what you mean, since language and meaning can be so wobbly sometimes. 🙂

      You are quite welcome! Am I going to get a chance to chat with you at Norwescon?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each Month

Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.

Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.

 

"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

You may also like...

Urban Fantasy: Well, Sort Of

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
How wonderful were those early books? I loved those illustrations.
Actually, I want to talk about something that shaped American fantasy as we know as well as a series that I encountered early and have loved ever since and that’s L. Frank Baum’s Oz.

I’ve been reading Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, by Michael D. Riley, which is about Baum’s life and the worlds that he created. It’s a folklore that feels very American, and yet it’s a mythology that few have drawn on: John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Tad Williams’s Otherland (which has some delightfully demented riffs on Oz) are two that occur to me. I’d love to see more using it for sure. A recent anthology, Shadows of the Emerald City, holds short stories influenced by Oz. (I was delighted to find it for $2.99 on the Kindle and am looking forward to reading it.) (Later edit: Let me add Tom Doyle’s well-done story, “The Wizard of Macatawa,” to the list of Oz-inspired works.)


At the same time, it’s part of Baum’s theory of fantasy that can be used to lead the discussion back in the direction of urban fantasy (beside the alternate direction where I go on about how much I’d like to see urban fantasy that draws on Oz and what forms that might take). Baum posited six kinds of fantasy:

  1. Stories that deal with marvelous machines and inventions of the future.
  2. Stories that take place completely in the imaginary world without the appearance of any character from our own world.
  3. Stories that explain origins (like Baum’s story about Santa Claus)
  4. The adventures of American characters “in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches”
  5. The adventures of fairies in our own world
  6. The animal fairy story

Urban fantasy falls into that fifth catagory, with “fairies” standing in for a multitude of supernatural creatures (I just picked up a Judith Fennell one with a male mermaid). Sometimes the protagonist is human – maybe fifty-fifty, maybe a little more in one direction or the other – but supernatural creatures are always there, in one form or another.

Does that seem like a fair thing to nail into a definition of urban fantasy?

...

Retreat, Day 3

I haven't written here yet.
I haven’t written here yet.
Words achieved today: 5022
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 85264
Total word count for the week: 10022
Total word count for this retreat: 10022
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, Christmas story for anthology (“My Name is Scrooge”)
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 10 minutes, but I’ll give it an hour this evening
Other stuff: prep for Saturday’s class
Steps: 10410

Excerpt from today’s work, part of Hearts of Tabat:

At the head of the Tumbril Stair is a landing, stone-bannistered, which overlooks all of the city. From that central point, one can look right and see the Duke’s castle far atop the cliffs overlooking the city, and then fifteen terraces down, shelf after shelf, flat lines broken by avenues of flowering trees and other staircases small and large and immediately at hand the oily black iron lines of the Great Tram with its basket cars swinging up and down, laden with those who had the pennies to spend on such transport.

At the edge of the water lies the Winter Garden and then the bay. Retreat inward a little, and the gaze encounters the docks and warehouses that are the center of the city’s industry. Keep traveling leftward for more shelves, and the great clots of smoke that mark the Slumpers, and then the salt-marshes, planted thick with purple and green reeds, a single channel leading through them to allow ships to come down from the Northstretch river and reach the sea.
The five terraces closest to the water were the saltwater neighborhoods; above them lay the freshwater. In Tabat, one distinguished between saltwater and freshwater, from matters such as foodstuffs to professions (for pilots it was the most important distinction, and the most bitterly fought). Even the markets were separated by that division, with the Saltmarket hosting only wares that knew the sea’s touch: dried fish for chal (which always must be made with salt fish), and bushels of seaweed, dried and fresh, smelling tangy sharp and green, and the woven reed-ware “” baskets and hats, parasols and stiff caplets, tight woven and rain-repellent “” that everyone wore once the summer heat started, until time to burn them in autumn’s bonfires.

Saltwater tailors dealt with fabrics from elsewhere “” silks and petals from the Rose Kingdom, cheap bright cottons from the Southern Isles “” and freshwater with homegrown, wools and flaxy linens, stiff and glossy but prone to wrinkling and expensive to maintain.

The Nittlescents were saltwater merchants, their house built on trade, perfumes and attars. Adelina had done her turns in the manufacturing side of the house, but her nose was not keen enough to be a perfumer, and she preferred the numbered side of things, the flow of revenue and payments that was the ledger reflection of that industry.

...

Skip to content