Cup of Dcaf: Getting Close to Your Characters

“Write what you know”, right? It’s one of the most common writing tips, something that writers of all ages have no doubt heard many times. It’s pretty sound advice on the surface. After all, it’s tough to write about, say, a location in Italy if you’ve never been there or studied it. Trying to do something along those lines is begging for the writing to feel flat.

On the other hand, we need to write about things we don’t know—namely, characters. I’ve found that it’s very common for inexperienced (often young) writers to write characters who are very similar to them. It’s easy to do, because you know yourself better than you know anyone else. But that doesn’t make for very interesting stories. Things will get very stale, very quickly when all of your protagonists are the same person.

So the question remains: how do you write a variety of characters? Continue reading

Book of the Week – August 13th, 2015

The Book of the Week is back! I know it’s been a couple weeks, and this has been harder to keep consistent than I thought it would. First, my computer decided to consistently freeze while I was on vacation—resulting in zero posts for over a week, and no writing done on Seeds of Sand, the way I’d planned—and then I came back to Colorado and started a new job almost immediately. It’s been a busy couple weeks.

But anyway, I’m trying to get back on schedule with things now. The Book of the Week is The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story by Stephen R. Donaldson.

The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story

Cup of Dcaf: Short Fiction and Scenes

After finishing the first draft of All Flames Cast, my mind has become increasingly bent on filling out the world and details of the next book(s) I’m going to tackle. I’ve found myself writing little character sketches, scenes, and short stories to help myself with building a new world for a new book. Over the course of this, I’ve gotten a clearer view of the differences between short stories and scenes, which is something I’ve found over the years to be a bit of a blurred line for many writers.

I went through a university degree in Creative Writing, as I know many, many other writers have, and as a result I kind of went through a crucible. There are a lot of pressures on an undergrad writing student—including the pressure to abandon genre fiction because of the flawed idea that it’s inherently inferior to lit fic—and one of those pressures is to learn how to write short stories. Continue reading

Mini State of Writing: All Flames Cast is done!

As many of you know, especially if you follow the Dcafwriting Facebook page, I finished the first* completed draft of All Flames Cast last Thursday. I spent Saturday evening meeting with my alpha readers and having a little discussion, but on the whole I’m taking a big step back from AFC and Chronicle of the Sons in general. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is obvious: I need to give the manuscript some breathing room before I go into revisions. I want to have a fresher perspective on the story and the characters, and come in with some distance from the text. I just spent about ten months breathing, bleeding, and writing this book—it’s tough to separate myself from it at this point in time.

On top of that, these past couple of weeks have been draining. Now, I’m not the fastest writer in the world. I’m not one of those people who can sit down and write 20,000 words in a day. A solid week for me is somewhere around 2500-3000 words a day, for maybe three days out of the week. Continue reading

Book of the Week – July 16th 2015

The Book of the Week is back! This time, we’re going to talk a little bit about one of my favorite series, and specifically one of my favorite books: Dreams of Steel, Book Five of The Black Company by Glen Cook. By necessity, there will be some slight spoilers that follow, but nothing major in any way.

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Creative Copy and Fiction