Tag Archives: literary techniques for genre fiction

For Writers: Working with Twinned and Twined Storylines

When I sat down to work out the outline for my Moving from Idea to Finished Draft, I came up with almost two dozen possible starting points for writing a story, including scene, title, taking an old plot, a character, dialog, a particular device, and more. As I finished writing it, those categories shifted around a little, sometimes sliding together, other times diverging, but I did think I’d managed to exhaust the possibilities…

…only to be proven wrong, of course. A week or so ago at the Surrey International Writers Conference I was absolutely delighted when an audience member hit me with a new one that I hadn’t considered at all.
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Preparing to Move

We are preparing to move and in some ways are inadequately prepared, while in others we are more than ahead. I hadn’t unpacked a good couple of dozen boxes from the study, so those can pretty much just go straight back out (this time we’re hiring movers rather than doing it ourselves).

It’s weird prepping to move again, to hope that this time we’ll manage to achieve escape velocity. We’ve got a renter for this place, and a year’s lease on the new one, so we’ll see. Today I’ll go through cupboards, try to sort out some stuff to pitch rather than take with us, take advantage of the opportunity to declutter and cull some old and faded spices, discard dingy rags, ditch old magazines, etc.
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Several New Classes, Plus On-Demand Content

I’ve just posted the latest round of classes, October through December, and wanted to call out a couple of highlights.
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Video: Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Online Class

Here’s another video, this time for the Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Online Class. This is my favorite so far. Discussion and in-class writing exercises designed to introduce a number of techniques to use in your own writing such as … Continue reading

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