Tag Archives: Nonfiction

All writing is improvisation. This cannot be repeated often enough. As a fanfic writer I alternate between writing stuff that just randomly popped up to tug my sleeve, and writing to prompts that appeal to me. There’s a whole very … Continue reading →

Ah, backstory. Everybody hates the info-dump, right? Writers hate how much their readers don’t know, and try to spare them the perils of ignorance; readers hate how much stuff the writer is feeding them (Why are you force-feeding me this … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of advice out there saying not to use second person, ever. Like any absolute rule, it’s wrong. Decades after reading it, I still remember the chapter about arrest and detention in the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG … Continue reading →