A Con Games Column I feel lucky because I did most of my writing before artificial intelligence (AI) became the Headless Horseman heedless of humankind. Pre-Chatbot, the ink-stained wretch had no choice but to write [...]
By Michael Conniff I don’t know what took me so long to get wise to crowdsourcing my stories. Maybe it was my old-school notion that writing a story actually required an individual person to do [...]
The right title makes all the difference—and a bad title can leave a work dead on arrival. Not only do titles (and headlines) matter, but they exist for one reason only: to make you want [...]
#1 Break The Rules Know the rule you are breaking. Rule #1 is a shot across the bow of those who would say you can’t do that: of course you can as long as you [...]
Everybody knows Keyser Soze. He’s the Turkish crime lord from The Usual Suspects, the classic noir directed by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie went on to write a raft of terrific scripts [...]
If you are a novelist, or a writer of any kind of fiction, ideas can arrive without making a sound—if you only have ears (or hearing aids) to hear. Take my new Young Adult novel, [...]
What follows below is the Author’s Note and Preface to WRITE GOOD 1.0, my virgin attempt to codify the rules of writing as I see ’em. Coming soon, one by one, will be the rules proper. In all cases, above and below, I would love to hear your comments.
If the showrunner for “The Walking Dead” on AMC were a major league coach or manager, the boo birds would have been calling for his neck and diehard fans in the stands would be wearing paper bags over their heads.
