Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 6

Writing Performance Review for 2024

My boss chews me out this time every year. He’s ornery, demanding, harsh, and knows me too well. He’s me.

The Scorecard

Time to assess my writing for 2024. As in past years, I’m using The Writer’s Performance Review scorecard by book coach, Jennie Nash.

To use this scorecard, you rank each attribute from one to five. One = below expectations. Two = partially meets expectations. Three = meets expectations. Four = exceeds expectations. Five = far exceeds expectations.

You’re compar...

The Barbenheimer and Glickéd Approach to Novels

In 2023, the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer got released at the same time, and the simultaneity struck audiences as funny. A cultural meme exploded—”Barbenheimer.” Rather than competing for audiences, promoters of the films capitalized on the meme.

Now in 2024, the movies Gladiator II and Wicked spawned their own portmanteau—Glickéd.

What if this weird cultural phenomenon had happened with novels? What if the two best-selling novels for each of the last ten years got combined the same w...

How Football Caused Thanksgiving

“Turn off the game,” my wife said. “It’s time for dinner.”

“But football is the main part of Thanksgiving,” I said. “Always has been.”

“What?” she asked.

Her question revealed a shocking gap in her historical knowledge. She really didn’t know about the centuries-long association between football and Thanksgiving. I explained it to her, but it occurred to me she might not be the only person whose history classes in school left out this important detail.

Well known to football fans...

Why are Writers so Mean to their Characters?

Authors do awful things to their characters, don’t they? They burden them with intractable dilemmas, cause heartache, fear, misery, and depression, to say nothing of life-and-death peril, often resulting in bodily harm or death. If writers wreaked such havoc on real people, they’d be locked up.

Image generated at www.perchance.org Advice from Authors

This past week, I attended a Zoom lecture given by author Jack Campbell. He said if you get stuck while writing, it’s often because you hav...

NaNoWriMo and Isaac Asimov

Every year, during November, thousands of budding authors take part in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). They’re using their spare time during these thirty days to write a novel.

NaNoWriMo Overview

That may sound impossible, but over 400,000 people will participate this year. Perhaps 20% of them will meet the requirements, to write 50,000 words in 30 days. When they’re done, they’ll feel immense relief in December and will relax after the strain of writing so much.

Of the...

Make Your Characters Distinctive

You populate your stories with a full cast of characters and expect readers to keep them all straight. Asking a lot, aren’t you? Today, I’ll explore ways to make that task easier for your audience, those kind folks who shell out money for your books.

Image created using www.perchance.orgSource Unknown

Though I try to credit my sources, I’ve misplaced the inspiration of this information. I subscribe to newsletters from DreamForge Magazine and one item from over three years ago prompted m...

Story Versus Craft, in a Cow Pasture

We’ll consider story and craft first, then relate them to a cow pasture.

Impetus Image generated on www.perchance.org

I read Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, hoping to learn to become a better writer. The book’s second half helped with that. The first half, which I read first, differed. It enumerated a list of grievances with a writers’ workshop that the author attended.

To understand the gist of his complaint, let’s start with definitions.

Story

For our purposes, le...

Select Your POV Character in 6 (or 7) Steps

You’re planning to write a story, but you don’t know whose point of view (POV) to tell it in. Author K.M. Weiland wrote a wonderful post on the subject, and I suggest you start there. I’ll wait here while you read that. The rest of my post supplements hers.

Credit to www.perchance.org for the imagesList the Contenders

Weiland’s 6-step process starts with identifying the contenders. You could choose any character in your story, or even select an omniscient, god-like POV.

Winnow Down ...

Ain’t Our First Rodeo

Once again, some stories of mine got published. The anthology Ain’t Our First Rodeo: Another Fort Worth Writers Anthology just came out.

They roped me into co-editing this anthology, the third for which I’ve served in an editorial capacity. With any luck, another geological epoch will pass before I edit another one.

We wrangled a lot into this volume. Altogether, seventeen authors contributed eighty-six works, including poems, essays, chapter excerpts, and short stories. They hogtied ev...

3 Tips for Compelling, Shareable Writing

Everyone who creates an online post, tweet, or meme hopes it goes viral. That occurs when others read it, like it, and share it. Viral posts often contain three key attributes. Do these same attributes apply to fiction in general?

Author, speaker, and producer Shane Snow blogged about these attributes and gave them an easy mnemonic to remember—FIN.

Image courtesy of PixabayFluency

The F in FIN stands for fluency. Snow means this in the sense of smooth, flowing prose, rather than fami...