Fiction Craft Blog

It's common for newer fantasy writers to focus heavily on worldbuilding while neglecting character development. After all, worldbuilding is a major draw in fantasy and speculative fiction. However, characters are equally important across all genres. Older fantasy novels often featured flat, undeveloped characters. Thankfully, the current Anglo-American market has evolved. The rise of Romantasy highlights the need for strong emotional storytelling in fantasy fiction. When done

Many authors find fight scenes notoriously difficult to write. Maybe you just skipped the fight scene chapter until last? Or maybe you haven’t even written it yet? Sound familiar? If so – and you’ve written a science fiction or fantasy novel – then this blog post is for you. So why are fight scenes tricky to write? Well, they’re usually high stakes and the outcome is crucial to the plot. In a fight scene, every sentence counts, and most authors don’t have lots of personal fig

When telling a story or writing a factual narrative in English, you have two main tenses you can use: present tense and past tense. Here are two examples: I walk to the castle and speak to the dragons I walked to the castle and spoke to the dragons In English, past tense is standard for fiction . This means its use is not stylistically marked. Writers have another option, too – the present tense . The tense used affects the reader experience: here's how. Use of the past tense

The standard advice for handling dialect in commercial fiction is to stick to fairly standard forms. Popular advice says that: 1) You can include more dialect in dialogue as it's not expected to be standard or "correct" 2) You can use a basic pattern to infer a strong dialect, but don't try and reproduce the dialect yourself unless you are very comfortable with it and use it. ( More on that here. ) 3) You can go "all in" and write a novel completely in nonstandard forms, but

“Write what you know” is popular advice often given to writers. That’s because it’s easier to imagine a setting you know well and write about it in a way that reflects what it really is like there. You’re less likely to make big errors that will make the story sound unbelievable or unconvincing to readers. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any research, and memory is fallible too, but it’s an easier option than writing beyond your experience. Setting and perspective offe