A different value: choice
Would you rather have a choice? Or would you rather not?I'm going to guess that when the question is asked that way, a lot of people will answer, "yes." In America, we tend to like to have choices. We have tons of them - just walk into the supermarket and try to buy breakfast cereal, or laundry detergent, and you'll discover how many options go into just a single choice around here.Or how about a restaurant, when you order? Would you like soup or salad with that? Salad? Great. What kind of dressing? You have six options to choose from.This is the kind of thing that many Americans relish. It's also the kind of thing that shuts a lot of people's bra

I'm a guest blogger!
It's almost Thanksgiving - today I'll be baking pies and making cranberry sauce, and generally filling my day with food instead of blogging. But! Lydia Sharp, over at The Sharp Angle, has been kind enough to invite me for a guest blog post on pronoun use and narrative distance, a.k.a. the intersection between point of view and "show don't tell." So thanks so much to Lydia, and here's the link. As always, I hope you find my musings useful.

Not hiding information that readers need
This post is intended to be an extension - a reversal, in fact - of my last post. In the same way that you can use backgrounding to slip in world information, you can also do yourself a disservice by "hiding" critical information that should be taking head billing. I've made comments to my critique buddies about how they shouldn't "hide X under Y" and it usually takes me a while to explain to them what I mean. So I figure it's useful to discuss here.If you have a critical piece of your plot, especially a voluntary action by your protagonist, then you should not hold back from describing that action. Don't imply that it happened. Don't make it passive. State it

Hiding Information in Plain Sight
What do you do with information that you need to "get across," but can't "explain"?If you write science fiction or fantasy, you're certainly aware of the magnitude of this problem - the one we fondly refer to as "infodumping." A big infodump can take readers off the main drive of the story, bore them and eventually dump them out of the story completely. Not good.So what do you do to keep them? Well, the common suggestion is to avoid infodumping, but the question is, how do you do that? This post will attempt to give you some ways - I hope, not the most common or obvious ways - to approach the problem.First suggestion: resist the instinct to explain.

Scientific American Takes On Aliens
Here's an article about the likelihood - or lack of it - that any aliens we encounter in the universe will look like us. Many thanks to Doug Sharp for pointing this one out to me! I hope you enjoy it.Will E.T. Look Like Us - Scientific American