Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 17
March 12, 2023
Your 3 Distinguishing Words
Using computers, you can measure peoples’ writing. You can compare recent bestsellers to books that didn’t sell well.
One man with interests in numerical analysis and literature tried just that. Ben Blatt wrote Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing. Megan Gambino interviewed him in this post.
Blatt analyzed books by many bestselling authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries, looking for patterns of word usage. He...
March 5, 2023
Want to be a Character in Your Own Book?
When authors write themselves in as characters in their fiction, we call it ‘self-insertion.’ Why and when might you try this literary technique?
The list of authors who’ve done this includes names you’ve heard of— Dante Alighieri, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Stan Lee, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and Daniel Handler (writing as Lemony Snicket). Pretty good company.
The technique varies. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante made himself the main character. He used self-i...
February 26, 2023
The Writing Centaur
Go ahead—make fun of artificial intelligence (AI) now. While you can.
In fiction writing, AI hasn’t yet reached high school level. (Note: I’m not disparaging young writers. It’s possible for a writer in junior high to produce wonderful, marketable prose. But you don’t see it often.)
For the time being, AI-written fiction tends toward the repetitive, bland, and unimaginative end. No matter what prompts you feed into ChatGPT, for example, it’s still possible to tell human-written stories ...
February 19, 2023
The SF Obsolescence Problem
No matter how much a science fiction writer keeps up with science, the writer’s stories will go obsolete.
As science advances, our understanding of the universe changes. A spherical earth replaced a flat one. A sun-centered solar system replaced an earth-centered one. Birds replaced reptiles as closer descendants of dinosaurs. Continental drift replaced an unchanging map.
SF stories based on outdated science seem backward, passe, naïve. Yet we still read them. Why?
When Mary Shelley ...
February 12, 2023
Deep or Immersive POV
You may have read my previous posts about Point of View (POV) here and here where I listed several types of POV. Now there’s a new kid in town.
Known as Deep POV or Immersive POV, it forms a sub-category under close 3rd person POV. To refresh memories, an author writing in 3rd person refers to a character by name or a ‘him/her’ type of pronoun, not as ‘I’ or ‘you.’ In close 3rd person POV, the author shows the story’s world through one character’s eyes.
Deep POV shares these features, ...
February 4, 2023
Sale on 20,000 Leagues Remembered – Only $2.99!
Two days ago, I mentioned a sale on the new anthology, Extraordinary Visions. Now I’m announcing a sale on another Jules Verne-related anthology—20,000 Leagues Remembered.
Maybe these publishers and book distributors are trying to celebrate Verne’s 195th birthday on February 8, I don’t know.
At any rate, in conjunction with a promotion at the Fussy Librarian, the ebook version of 20,000 Leagues Remembered is on sale for $2.99 at the publisher’s site, as well as Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and S...
February 1, 2023
Sale on Extraordinary Visions – 20% Off!
BearManor Media, Inc., the publisher of Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne is letting the book go for 20% off. The sale only runs through February 4, so hurry.
When you order either the hardcover or paperback version, it will show up at full price until you put the book in your shopping cart. Then you’ll see the discount.
As a reminder, the North American Jules Verne Society sponsored their first-ever anthology of stories written by modern authors, each inspired by V...
January 29, 2023
Do You Log Your Reading?
Writers should read. I’m rather organized about it, maybe bordering on anal. This week marks twenty years since I started keeping a log of my reading.
My spreadsheet started in January 2003. Since then, I’ve read 637 books. Fiction comprised 67% of these. Over those two decades, I’ve averaged 12.6 days per book.
In my spreadsheet, I note the date I finished, the title, author, and whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. For text-type books (print or ebook) I enter the number of pages and co...
January 22, 2023
Learning to Write Stories—Analysis or Practice?
What’s the best way to learn how to write stories? Should you just start writing a lot and work to improve? Or should you study the works of the best writers and understand their techniques before setting fingers to keyboard yourself? Or a combination of the two?
Image from PicjumboA writer friend enrolled in a literary master’s degree program and took a short story workshop class. The instructor told the students to dissect a literary work and analyze it. My friend discovered the entire w...
January 15, 2023
On Your Mark—Racing in Fiction
Few events excite us as much as a race, a competition of speed. Sports fans love racing. Readers love to read about races, and writers rush to fill that need.
Image from PixabayFor this post, I use the term ‘race’ to mean a contest of speed, not a means of differentiating people based on physical characteristics.
In fiction, a race allows a writer to introduce thrills and tension, to reveal a character’s traits, and to heighten conflict. Races often pit the protagonist against either a...
