Warren Ellis explains his short stints on corporate owned comics
I’m okay with painting other people’s houses for short periods, because I’m good at it and it pays well and on nice days it’s fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other […]
I got an email today about this project put on by these people. Write a 100 page script in a month. It doesn’t seem too daunting. I signed up and so should you. come on, whattya… chicken?
even if you don’t like formalist BS, there’s plenty of cool resources for anyone wanting to write a script.
from good ol’ Kurt Vonnegut
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one […]
Successful dialogue is tricky. For dialogue to resonate it must appear natural while also doing more than one thing at a time. In many creative writing classes teachers will ask their students to go out in the world and document their senses. These assignments do help a writer develop a keen eye/ear/nose/tongue/touch for the world […]
There are thorns in everyone’s side in the publishing world. If you send an editor something they don’t need, that’s a bit of a thorn. If an editor rejects you repeatedly, that’s a thorn. If an editor prints you, but fouls up your format or creates typographical errors when inputting your poem into print, that’s […]
Creating Character
Before I even begin a rough draft, I do character sketches. I’ve found that this ultimately saves me time. Before I worked with this method I would write draft after draft, trying to feel out the story. What I learned is that I understood the plot well enough, but I didn’t quite have a […]
Author’s note: This post is designed with poetry submission in mind, though some aspects of it may apply to other forms of writing, especially short stories and the such. Certainly the role of simultaneous submission changes considerably when you’re submitting something as large and time-consuming as a novel or book manuscript, and my opinion of […]
Jesse Hamm has some interesting (though not entirely convincing) things to say about why comics writers should step off and let the artist draw. I’m not sold on his line of action “rule,” his ideas on visual cliche’s seem a little too vague, I kind of like the “archie andrews two-face” and a few of […]
First off, just let me say you don’t need an agent to publish. There are ways to talk to editors directly (even from larger publishing companies) and cut out the middle man.There are lots of conferences set up for you to talk directly to editors (such as PNWA Writing Conference and the Willamette Writer’s […]