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Fantasy Author's Handbook: Fantasy Author's Handbook – Advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, and horror
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Have I really written fifty of these?
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books I think fantasy authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for the fantasy author, so worth l...
I know. You have done the work. You have notebooks full of worldbuilding notes. You have built the fantasy world.
And you’re absolutely sure your readers not only need to know but want to know everything about that world. That’s why we read fantasy, right? For the worldbuilding.
So, its not an info dump you’re writing, i...
Over and over again I’ve used the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s short story “Red Wind” as an example of atmospheric writing by establishing not just the setting, but how it makes our first person narrator, Philip Marlowe, feel:
There was a desert wind blowing t...
This time last year we read Writing After Dark by Bonnie Friedman for the GoodReads group read. I kept this photo of one page, and my marg...
Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
—Francis Bacon
Digging deeper into the technique of show, don’t tell, let’s look at a couple good examples of showing a character experiencing an emotion rather than telling us that character is exp...