For 2021, I rated myself as a 73 out of 100. My weakest areas were: Goal Orientation, Industry Knowledge, and Strategic Thinking. I only gave myself a 2 rating in each of those.
For each weak area, I need a plan for improvement. Goal Orientation is relatively easy for me—I just lost sight of doing it now that I’m retired. For Industry Knowledge, I committed to monthly checks of publishing trends, easily done with internet searches. For Strategic thinking, I need to do some research about my ideal readers and their influencers.
Other areas of weakness where I rated myself as 3 were: Self-editing skills, Organization and planning, Genre knowledge, Target audience knowledge, Literary citizenship – peer to peer, and Coachability. Since I meet expectations with these, and since this is the first year I’m doing this assessment, I’m not going to set firm plans for improvement in these areas. That will allow me to focus on the worst areas—the ones with ratings of 2.
As I mentioned, you can use that Writer’s Performance Review, too. It’s important to be honest as you do so. Still, I found it much easier than annual performance reviews at work. Both receiving them from supervisors and giving them to subordinates were stressful events. A self-assessment skips all that worry about how the other person perceives you.
The end of each year is a good time for reflection, review, assessment, and planning for the future. If you try to be as objective as possible with it, this tool might very well improve your writing, whether you create fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Improved writing—that’s the shared goal of you and—
We know practice can help us improve our abilities in various areas. Yet many people believe they can sit down and write a blockbuster novel without any writing practice. Maybe you’re the rare exception who can, but most of us need practice.
Not just any kind of practice. Good practice helps. Bad practice not only wastes your time, but it also hurts by ingraining poor habits. This wonderful blog post by Barbara Baig inspired the one you’re reading now. She calls the two types naïve practice and deliberate practice, so I’ll stick with her terms.
When young, I played the cello. I don’t play anymore, but I enjoyed it while I did. Early on, before I learned how to practice, it felt like drudgery. My mom said, “Someday, when you play in Carnegie Hall, remember to tell the audience that you owe everything to your mother, who made you practice.” Sorry, Mom, that opportunity never arose.
Practice, in those early years, consisted of my playing a piece from start to finish. Once I did that to my satisfaction—a rather low bar—I moved on to the next piece. In Ms. Baig’s blogpost, that’s called naïve practice. Over time, I discovered an interesting thing. Whether in practice or performance, I played some passages well, without effort, consistently. However, I stumbled in other spots—the same spots, and the same sort of stumbling, every time.
I tried practicing a different way. I focused only on the rough spots, playing them over and over, then backing up and leading into them, then continuing on after them to ensure transitions both ways went smoothly. In this way, I developed ‘finger memory.’ My fingers knew how to play the difficult passages with less conscious thought on my part.
My skill as a cellist improved after that. I’d learned the secret of deliberate practice, and nearly all my practice time served to better my playing, rather than to reinforce poor playing.
What does this have to do with writing? Everything. You may be getting plenty of writing practice—story after story, novel after novel. But perhaps you’re not reaching a large audience, not achieving hoped-for sales.
Perhaps you’re putting in naïve practice, doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get better that way. Improvement might happen, but there’s a quicker path.
Use the deliberate practice technique I mentioned above. First, identify the stumbling points in your writing, perhaps from a critique group, or a trusted beta reader. You might also learn something from online reviews of your stories.
Knowing your weak points, assign yourself some brief writing exercises designed to work on those particular problems. Here’s a list of examples:
Weak in characterization? Flesh out a character in extreme detail.
Weak in setting description? Visualize a setting in minute detail, then pick three facts that really make the setting vivid.
Weak in working out plots? Outline the plot of your favorite story, or one you just read. What do you like about that story’s plot? In a similar way, outline the plot of several stories you’d like to write.
Weak in use of the senses? Take a scene from your Work in Progress (WIP) and put all five senses into it.
Weak in comparisons? Find three to five things in your WIP that are hard to describe or visualize. For each one, brainstorm twenty similes or metaphors you could use to make it clear to the reader.
They say practice makes perfect. You may never achieve perfection, but getting closer to that ideal may prove good enough. Deliberate practice may get you writing, and playing the cello, better than—
Had a frantic, but fun-filled weekend at Chessiecon 2021. Chessiecon, named for the sea monster lurking in the Chesapeake Bay, is a science fiction and fantasy convention held each year during the Thanksgiving weekend. For the second year, they made it a virtual conference. And free!
I find it energizing to be in the company of other authors. Their different perspectives on the activity we love always inspires new story ideas. I’ll summarize the seven panels for you.
How to be a panelist / moderator / presenter at SF/F cons
Author DH Aire did a fine job moderating this panel, consisting of Yakira Heistand and me. We shared our experiences, good and bad, and some valuable tips for serving as a panelist, moderator, or presenter at Chessiecon or other cons.
Underwater Cities. Is there merit to this idea?
I moderated this panel, with help from Linda Adams and John Monahan as panelists. Together we held a wide-ranging, informative discussion of the implications and likelihoods of underwater cities of the future. I’m ready to move to one now!
Why Read the Classics?
A rather heavy topic for a Saturday morning, but we did our best to keep it light and fun. Though I moderated the topic, Melissa Scott and Thomas Atkinson needed little help or direction from me as they spoke about classic literature they enjoyed, its impact on their lives and writing, and the lasting importance of the classics.
Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To?
Yakira Heistand moderated this panel, with Linda Adams and me as panelists. Science Fiction has certainly changed over the decades, and we explored the differences between stories then and now, and the reasons for them.
Pandemics Throughout History, and Their Effects on Literature
If we’d done this panel two years ago, nobody would have showed up. Suddenly everyone’s interested in pandemics. I served as a moderator for this panel, with Melissa Scott and John Monahan as expert panelists. If you take the list of pandemics in history, and the list of stories about pandemics, you can match them up pretty well. Moreover, there’s an evolution of the types of stories, from straight reporting of actual plagues as facts of life, to stories of made-up diseases, to tales focusing on the race for cures and vaccines, to viruses from space, to man-caused pandemics, and, most recently, to diseases with bizarre symptoms.
Worldbuilding in Your Story
Basically, we taught attendees how to play God for fun and profit. Once again, I moderated, with Cathy Hird (who posts a weekly column in the Owen Sound Hub), Melissa Scott, and John Monahan as my esteemed panelists. They did a great job conveying the fun of building your own fictional world, with instructions and warnings about the pitfalls.
What Did I Do to Survive the Great Pandemic?
Held late on Saturday night, this panel surprised me. I thought nobody would show up. Worse, Chessiecon hadn’t designated a moderator. There I was, along with Yakira Heistand and John Monahan, scheduled to talk about surviving a pandemic. Not only did people show up, but we invited them into the discussion and they contributed fascinating stories of how the pandemic changed their lives.
All in all, a wonderful time. It’s not every weekend that I can enjoy the company of authors, fans, and a sea monster, without once leaving the home of—
You’re invited to join me at a virtual science fiction and fantasy convention this weekend. Give me a second while I find out what they’re charging for admission to this thing…wait…ah, here. No, that can’t be right. It’s free?
I guess so. You can listen all weekend to my inciteful and inspiring ideas for nuttin’. Nada. Zero dollars and zero zero cents. (Well, you’re invited to make a donation.) Here’s the Chessiecon website where you can register to attend.
Anyway, I’ve listed my schedule below, which is subject to change. All times are Eastern time zone.
Date/Time
Title
Description
Fri 4:30 PM
How to be a panelist / moderator / presenter at SF/F cons
New to trying to herd cats? Not only does a moderator need to encourage panelists, stop one panelist from taking over the whole shebang, but also a moderator needs to be able to read the audience.
Fri 9:00 PM
Underwater Cities. Is there merit to this idea?
What are the Engineering, Social, and Environmental limitations to expanding the areas of earth’s surface that people can inhabit?
Sat 10:00 AM
Why Read the Classics?
Do they still have something to teach us, or are they just not something of interest to a 21st-Century audience?
Sat 2:30 PM
Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To?
We all know the trope that s/ff has always has at least overtones of politics; but what other things have changed or not changed in the field?
Sat 4:00 PM
Pandemics Throughout History, and Their Effects on Literature
2019-2021 is not the first regional, continental or even global pandemic in history. How have these events affected literature, be it fantasy, speculative or science-fiction literature?
Sat 8:30 PM
Worldbuilding in Your Story
Physical characteristics, societies, geography, languages, and what else might fit. And how this affects your stories
Sat 10:30 PM
What Did I Do to Survive the Great Pandemic?
How our panelists muddled through, and yet, still somehow are not zombies. Note: may be slightly delayed if the chorus runs over slightly.
I’ll be moderating the Underwater Cities panel, the Classics panel, and the Worldbuilding panel. I’ll be a panelist for the rest.
How many opportunities do you get to listen to me for free? Heck, I don’t even get that deal. I charge myself admission, and I pay up, ‘cause I’m worth it.
But you don’t have to pay a cent to listen to seven sensational sessions this Friday and Saturday when you’ll hear the portentous pontifications of—
In previous posts, I’ve promoted joining a critique group as a way to improve your writing. I still stand by that, but critique groups—being made up of humans—aren’t perfect. Sometimes you might have to drop out and join a new one.
Critique groups consist of writers who review and comment on each other’s work. Always voluntary, and usually free or low cost, they meet either in person or online. Through these interactions, you can learn how to improve your writing, and how to give effective critiques that help your fellow writers. Useful ideas often come from these meetings, and you’ll find yourself hearing the voices of your fellow writers as you work on your manuscripts.
Still, they can go bad. As discussed by Anne R. Allen in this informative post, there are several types of critique group members to watch out for. I’ll summarize her list and put it in my own words, but the ideas are hers.
Perpetually Offended. These are writers who can’t look beyond their personal belief systems, whether religious, political, racial, sexual, etc. It’s one thing for them to point out a stereotyped character in your story. That’s fair, and valuable. But to tell you that your writing offended them is not helpful. You won’t receive good critiques from such people.
Enforcers of the Old Rules. Some group members might say you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, or hit you with some other outdated rule they learned from a high school English teacher. Or they might be just plain wrong. Either way, ignore these criticisms.
Ignorers of Group Norms. Critique groups need rules, whether written or not, and members should abide by them. How does the group get new members, or kick out a disruptive one? How long can submissions be? How are critiques offered and received? Members that violate the rules detract from the critique experience.
Bad or Missing Group Moderator. Groups can sometimes work better with a leader, but a bad leader can ruin the experience. Anne R. Allen listed this item, but I don’t entirely agree. I’ve been a member of a leaderless critique group for twenty years. It’s small (four people), and we did once discuss having a leader, but we never chose one and haven’t suffered for it.
Grammarians in a Gaggle. You’ll benefit from having at least one grammar expert in the group. But if that becomes the group focus, rather than plot or character or description, then you’re missing most of what critiques should be about.
Control Freaks. Some group members might get grumpy or angry if you don’t take their advice. These folks forget whose name will go on the published story—the author’s, not the critique group members. You are free to take or reject any advice from any group member, and their inability to accept that is their problem.
Pollyannas. One or more members might give you only praise—nothing negative. A good critique should have positive and negative elements. We feel good when others like our work, but if they don’t point out the bad parts, they’re not helping you.
Re-writers. These folks think they have a better idea for your whole story concept, and it sounds like something they’d write. Listen to their advice in case it contains a useful nugget, but otherwise ignore them.
Self-Proclaimed Experts. Some people sound authoritative and spew false assertions with utter confidence. You’ll probably believe them the first time, but after a fact-check proves them wrong, you should doubt their advice after that.
Initiation Shamans. On occasion a group includes someone who makes things tough on newcomers. Their scorching critiques are enough to make a newbie quit the first day.
Got enough of these types in your critique group? Quit and find (or form) a better one. No need to remain part of a group that’s not helping you.
Also, (need I say it?) you should avoid exhibiting the above behaviors yourself. I’ve probably hit about half of them at some point, so don’t join any group that includes—
If you write, you’d like to write faster. But how? On October 20, I attended a webinar by prolific author Vi Khi Nao, and she said some things that might interest and help you.
Vi Khi Nao
She titled her talk, ‘How to Write Effortlessly and Quickly,’ and I was struck by her four ‘productivity techniques,’ called Inflexible, Exact, Flexible, and Ideal Muse.
When she declared that last one, Ideal Muse, as her favorite, I figured I’d skip to it. Then she said you can’t skip. You must work through each technique in order.
Dang. That makes them more like steps or stages. You must go through them in order, she stated, because you will learn something at each stage that helps you in the next one.
I’ll outline each stage in my own words. What follows is my interpretation of what she said. If I got it wrong, it’s my fault, not hers.
Inflexible
Determined to write more, Vi Khi Nao put aside as much of her non-writing life as possible. She limited her interactions with others, devoting herself to writing. She filled her days with writing, and became ‘inflexibly disciplined’ about it.
Her output grew. She wrote a lot. However, she considered most of the resulting manuscripts bad. Her own prose bored her, and it required heavy editing. In the end, after many drafts, she ended up with a tiny amount of quality writing. Practicing this technique, many of us might find our health suffering, along with our relationships with friends and loved ones.
Still, she learned writing discipline, the value of daily ritual. She experienced writing in the flow, without self-editing.
Exact
She tried something else, setting a more modest goal of 10,000 words every two weeks. This time, she strove for quality as well as quantity. She decided any kind of writing counted as part of her 10,000 words—short stories, novellas, screenplays, and poems. She worked on bits of everything, alternating, much like a farmer rotates crops.
With a variety of projects going at once, she found her creativity stimulated. Although she didn’t mention it, I suspect her relationships with others improved after stopping the previous Inflexible technique. The new, modest, 10,000-word goal helped relieve some mental pressure, and her product required less editing. However, I suspect most of us would gravitate toward short and easy projects to meet the word count goal.
From this technique she learned a better balance between quality and quantity.
Flexible
Still seeking a way to produce high-quality writing faster, she set precise end goals (a novel by this date, a screenplay by that date, etc.) but allowed time for flexing. She wrote based on the momentum of the moment, when the mood struck. While maintaining the discipline of writing each day, if she entered the flow zone, she went with it.
The emphasis on quality helped her writing. Having established good writing habits in the earlier techniques, she got quantity along with it. However, I suspect she still felt guilty when not writing, and she still wasn’t in tune with her muse, her inner creativity.
The Flexible stage teaches the elasticity of time itself. All hours are not equal for a writer. All days are not equal. Quality writing requires time, but cannot be created in a linear way.
Ideal Muse
Knowing now that her muse didn’t clock in and clock out at specific times, she merged all previous techniques and allowed her muse to schedule her writing. When the muse struck, she dropped everything and wrote, no matter what. If shopping, she wrote in the store. If driving, she pulled over and wrote. She set product-driven goals, not date-specific ones. Sometimes she wrote for five minutes, other times for five hours. She monitored her health, knowing she couldn’t write in an unhealthy state.
At which stage are you right now? If increasing my productivity means I must start with the Inflexible stage, I’m not ready to sacrifice everything else in life for my writing. Still, I believe I’ve gone through a lesser version of the first two stages, and am in the Flexible stage now.
Oh, English. You’re an interesting language, but you’re burdened with some old baggage. Maybe it’s time you changed.
logo for International Pronouns Day
Today is International Pronouns Day (IPD). A day to recognize your acquaintances might choose different pronouns than you expect, and it’s only polite to use the ones they want.
You might meet a stranger who says, “Hi. I’m Jessica and I go by the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Since Jessica told you that, it would be impolite if you said to someone else, “I just met Jessica, and she…”
The discussion of pronouns interests me as a writer. As English changes, I’d like to keep up with it.
In general, pronouns serve as a naming shorthand, enabling us to refer to a person repeatedly without stating the person’s name each time. In a traditional written story, when a female character is speaking with a male character, the author need only write ‘she said’ or ‘he said’ and the reader can follow the dialogue with ease.
Although English does not divide all nouns into feminine and masculine genders as some other languages do, present-day English does include gender-specific pronouns such as ‘she,’ ‘her,’ ‘he,’ and ‘him.’ Although many people seem happy with that arrangement, some prefer to be thought of as an individual, not as a member of one or the other gender.
At the moment, the English language hasn’t settled on an agreed set of non-gender-specific pronouns for people. ‘It,’ ‘Its,’ and ‘Itself’ seem too dehumanizing. While many candidate pronouns vie for the honor, that leaves us in a period of flux until winners emerge through widespread use.
In the meantime, you may choose your own preferred pronoun, and—according to the promoters of International Pronouns Day—inform your friends and new acquaintances. They, in turn, should respect your wishes.
Still, I find it difficult to change at my age. I grew up in a time when you couldn’t choose your own pronouns. Language and biology chose them for you. I now have enough problems remembering people’s names, and if all my acquaintances chose different pronouns, I’d go around mis-pronouning them all the time.
In my fiction, I stand a chance of abiding by the IPD guidance. I just finished reading a novel where characters introduced themselves by stating their name and preferred pronouns. For my stories set in the world of today or the near future, I could do the same thing. Depending on how appropriate it might be for a given character, I’ll try it.
In the meantime, I wish you a happy International Pronouns Day. Delighted to meet you. I’m—
Link charts—I know you’ve seen them. Big, poster-size charts with pictures and words, arrows and colored threads connecting things. Complex, but visually stunning. Could you use one to write your novel?
You’ve seen link charts on shows featuring detectives and others with basement conspiracy theorists. You may have seen two of them on a TV ad for CarGurus. Note: I’m neither endorsing nor disparaging CarGurus.
From what I understand, real-life detectives rarely, if ever, use link charts. But TV and movie detectives do, for two simple reasons. Link charts convey, in one picture, that the detective’s done a lot of work, and they show, at a single glance, a lot of relationships between people and things. They make for a great visual in a visual medium.
That second property may prove useful to you. If you’re writing a novel, you’re keeping track of many characters, settings, events, etc. To organize that data, you most likely think like a writer and write it all down—on sticky notes, index cards, notepaper in three-ring binders, computer files, online wikis, etc. You waste considerable time wading through your files to track down something you half-remember writing months ago.
At such times, you might wish you could have it all handy, in one place. A link chart might help. You’ve seen TV sleuths stare at their charts and snap their fingers, and you know they’ve just solved the case. Staring at a big picture of your novel might aid you, too.
Some years ago, I learned some of the data visualization principles espoused by Edward Tufte. He advocates data-rich illustrations that present all the data. Often these get very complex, but backing up from their complexity, a viewer discerns patterns, relationships, and trends. Tufte’s illustrations represent gestalts, greater than the sum of their parts.
I don’t know what Tufte would make of link charts in particular, but a well-made link chart can satisfy Tufte’s principles of visually representing data.
How might you set up a link chart for the novel you’re writing? Here are some ideas:
A plot outline tying the settings to the characters to the events
A motive-means-opportunity chart relating all suspects to a murder, if you’re writing a murder novel
In the CarGurus TV commercial, the woman knows a quicker way for the man to get the car he wants, implying the link charts just wasted his time. However, until someone comes up with a NovelGuru app that writes a novel for you (c’mon, app developers, get on that!), a link chart might prove beneficial.
If you do develop your own link chart, consider hiding it so nobody else sees the thing without you being present to explain it. Someone happening upon your link chart might suspect you’re hunting for Big Foot, correlating UFO sightings, or planning a real-life murder.
Unless, of course, you’d rather have them think you’re doing those things, than writing a novel!
Whatever link chart you make, do not connect any threads between Big Foot, UFOs, or murders to—
If you’d like your fiction to sell well, wouldn’t it be beneficial if readers found your stories easy to read?
Not all writers see it that way. Some authors of the world’s great classic literature made it tough on their readers, but their books still became bestsellers. Obviously, readability alone doesn’t determine great writing.
For the most part, the factors of great writing remain intangible, but you can measure readability. Many word processor software packages calculate the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease’ score, as well as the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level,’ both standard measures of readability. The higher the Reading Ease score and the lower the Grade Level, the more readable your story.
Journalist Shane Snow inspired me to think along these lines with this wonderful blogpost. He did a lot of research obtaining Flesch-Kincaid data on many great fiction authors, and graphed it all.
That made me wonder how I measured up. I obtained the data on my ten most recently published stories. Listed from least readable to most readable, here they are:
Story
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
Genre
Year Written
“The Steam Elephant”
69.0
6.8
Alt Hist
2006
“Target Practice”
69.3
6.5
Scifi
1999
“The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall”
69.8
6.5
Alt Hist
2011
“Reconnaissance Mission”
71.4
6.2
Alt Hist
2019
“Ripper’s Ring”
72.2
6.4
Alt Hist
2015
“Moonset”
74.8
5.3
Horror
2018
“A Clouded Affair”
75.9
5.5
Scifi
2014
“The Cats of Nerio-3”
76.3
5.1
Scifi
2016
“After the Martians”
78.3
5.1
Scifi
2015
“Instability”
79.1
4.8
Alt Hist
2017
Not too many obvious patterns there. My alternate history stories tend toward less readability than my straight science fiction, but not always. To some degree, I’ve improved readability with the passing years, but there’s some scatter in that, too.
When I average the F-K Grade Level of these stories, I get 5.82. According to one of the charts in Shane Snow’s post, that puts me around the readability level of Hunter S. Thompson, and between early J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad company.
If my stories don’t sell as well as theirs, it only proves that, as I mentioned above, readability alone doesn’t make for great writing.
What if it did? Could you write in a way that maximizes your Flesch-Kincaid readability score? The Wikipedia entry gives the formula. It’s very simple. Just take your average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and the rest is math.
To make readers struggle, use long words and long sentences. To make your writing more readable, do the opposite.
To make your stories irresistible and widely sold…ah, that’s the magic formula I’d really like to know. That equation—whatever it is—might contain readability as one factor, but also many others. Ernest Hemingway earned a F-K Grade Level of just over 4, and Michael Crichton earned one a little under 9.
Shane Snow makes the point that a lower F-K Grade Level allows you to reach a larger potential audience for your stories. However, he cites two other factors that help determine whether your writing will gain traction and catch on. I’ll discuss my take on those in a future blogpost.
Although readability alone won’t determine whether your stories sell in the marketplace, consider this: if all other factors rated the same between two stories, wouldn’t you prefer the more readable one? I suspect you would, and so would—
Many great writers suffered early in life and during their writing careers. Of these, a good number wrote from a place of suffering, capturing that pain and creating timeless novels.
Did their suffering lead to classic writing? If so, would these authors have written so well if not for their suffering? In other words, is personal suffering necessary to produce great art?
What about those of us who have led relatively happy and disease-free lives? Do we lack the necessary ingredients to produce great fiction?
The list of writers who suffered from health ailments alone (never mind other sorts of problems) is long. Here’s a partial list:
John Milton—likely a detached retina leading to blindness
Jonathan Swift—Ménière’s Disease leading to vertigo and tinnitus, obsessive-compulsive disorder
The Brontë Sisters—tuberculosis and depression; one may have had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Herman Melville—pains in joints, back, and eyes due to Ankylosing Spondylitis which brought on depression
Fyodor Dostoevsky—epilepsy, gambling addiction, severe depression
Jules Verne—stomach cramps from colitis, painful facial paralysis from Bell’s Palsy
Edith Wharton—typhoid fever, asthma
Jack London—bipolar disorder, scurvy, alcoholism, leg ulcers
Virginia Woolf—depression, mood swings, hallucinations
James Joyce—eye problems after gonorrhea treatments
F. Scott Fitzgerald—heavy drinking, heart disease
Ernest Hemingway—depression, alcoholism, electroshock treatments
George Orwell—damaged bronchial tubes after childhood bacterial infection, tuberculosis
Tennessee Williams—depression, drug and alcohol addiction
Sylvia Plath—depression; shock therapy; several suicide attempts
Perhaps your life doesn’t include any ailments nearly as severe as any on that list. Does that eliminate you from contention on some future list of great authors?
Fiction revolves around conflict, and therefore fictional characters must suffer. That’s necessary so readers can believe in them, identify with them, and root for them during their struggles.
Writers with health problems may have an edge here. They can write out of their own painful experiences. They’ve gazed into the abyss themselves, and garner instant credibility.
However, not all people who’ve suffered end up as successful novelists. Further, not all great writers suffered from anything more severe than the typical pains of a normal life.
I think what matters more is your ability to identify deeply with a suffering character you’ve created, and to convey that suffering to readers with your words. That strong empathy will come through, and distinguish your writing.
You needn’t have endured intense personal suffering to create great fiction. Make your protagonist suffer, though, and convince your readers to care about that character.
Hellen Keller knew something about the subject, and wrote, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
You may not have suffered as she did, but you can write. On the journey toward great fiction writing, whether you’ve suffered or not, you’re free to join—
