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Category Archives: Details, details

Ideas, Ideas – The Temple of the Dreamers

Posted on by in Creating My Writing Voice, Details, details, Ideas
When Orah and Nathaniel enter the Temple of the Dreamers, high up on the mountain, I didn’t want them to immediately barge into the chamber holding the cocoons, a sterile room dominated by technology. Beyond needing to build anticipation, I felt the haughty dreamers would have embellished the place where they strove for immortality by creating spectacular anterooms as the approach to where their science worked

Ideas are everywhere

Posted on by in Details, details, The mood of a scene, Urge to Write

What do the following have in common?

[jcolumns model="4" halign="center"] [pb_slideshow group="1"] [jcol/] [/jcolumns] A rustic stone church in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, Mt. Etna, the Temple of Zeus in Agrigento, the old merry-go-round in Oak Bluffs, the Chihuly Glass Museum in Seattle, and the Palantine Chapel in Palermo. All of these are sources of inspiration for my next novel, the sequel to The Children of Darkness. I've always believed that the difference between the creative and non-creative person is not the

World of Warcraft and Prince Frederick’s Azeroth

Posted on by in Building Characters, Details, details, The mood of a scene, Uncategorized
Where did some of the ideas come from for Prince Frederick's fantasy world? From World of Warcraft, of course. As research for Along the Watchtower, I played a lot of World of Warcraft. I started when my son, an avid player, invited me to meet him in Azeroth and go on quests together as a way of visiting. With him on the west coast and me on the east, it was an invitation I could hardly ignore.

My Writing Style

Posted on by in Building Characters, Creating My Writing Voice, Details, details, The mood of a scene
Matthew Arnold wrote: “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can.” Hemingway said it a bit differently: “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the simplest possible way.”
I believe good writing is clear thinking, saying what you mean in the simplest possible way. The problem for fiction writers is that we don’t always know

Details, details…A cool cup of steaming tea

Posted on by in Details, details
Writers are always taught to show, not tell. A good example of this is at the beginning of The Night Circus, the wonderful debut novel by Erin Morgenstern. Early in the book, Prospero the Enchanter is called into his theater manager’s office, because a five-year old girl has been left for him, brought in by a lawyer along with her mother’s suicide note. Other than being told

Pixels, words and the eye of the beholder

Posted on by in Building Characters, Details, details, The mood of a scene

Recently, my wife was helping me by doctoring an image of a young girl in Photoshop. She zoomed in on the image until all we could see were blurred patches of color. Then she lightened the color of three pixels. At that instant, the image was unrecognizable. But when she zoomed back out and we compared the new version with the original, the expression on the girl’s face had changed entirely.

Details, details…A storm inside the room

Posted on by in Creating My Writing Voice, Details, details, The mood of a scene
We're told today's twittering reader has a short attention span, is easily bored. Stories need to be fast paced and not bog down in details. No Jane Austen ruminations or Melville's descriptions of the whaling industry. I recently read a book called Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. The book was unusual as books for writers go because it's basic premise is that rules are made to be broken.
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