Toni Morrison’s Jazz is, simply put, a masterpiece. The prose is spectacular, with a rhythm and life that demands you slow down and listen. The characters are incredibly real, layered,…
Hello, all! This is the last blog post I’ll be writing before Halloween, so I decided to write about something spooky: Rosemary's Baby, the much beloved horror classic by Ira…
Naming characters is hard, and not nearly as fun as telling their stories. And, often, it’s not just less fun… it gets in the way of writing. Some writers freeze…
It can’t be stressed, enough: Terry Pratchett was ahead of his time. In Equal Rites (the third novel in the Discworld series), Terry Pratchett uses his wit, humor, and grand…
Literary fiction has a bad reputation for being low on the “entertain-o-meter,” a completely imaginary device that I pretend to use to measure how engaging a novel is. So, it…
(Quick heads-up before we start: this article contains some light spoilers for the endings to both The Light Fantastic and The Color of Magic.) The Light Fantastic is the second…
(Part 1 can be read here)(Part 2 can be read here) Long-distance communication is an important topic for writers to grasp. Stories are moved by conflict, and most of that…
(Part 1 of this series can be found here)(Part 3 of this series can be found here) Welcome, all, to a communications course that you aren’t getting a lick of…
(Part 2 of this series can be found here)(Part 3 of this series can be found here) When I started doing research for this series of articles, I’d planned on…
There aren’t enough plagues in writing. Epidemic diseases have shaped our world more than almost any other force, whether we’re aware of it or not. They egged on the “Dark…