Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 7

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...

Revive Your Open, Creative Mind

How often do you read a book, watch a TV show, or see a movie, and think, “How clever! I wish I could come up with ideas like that.” You can. I’ll tell you how.

Seeing the World a New Way

Creative people share a trait. Their brain neurons connect in a different manner than those of other people. When you sense the world around you, it is what it is. Creative people sense what the world could be.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Psychologists talk of ‘trait theory’ and the ‘Big Five’ persona...

Uptime for Writers

You’re a fiction writer who wants to crank out better books faster. Maybe this blogpost will help you do that.

Intro to Uptime

I just read Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing by Laura Mae Martin. The author worked as a productivity expert at Google who helped employees do more work faster, with less stress. Could her techniques work for fiction writers?

She packed her short book with numerous techniques, and many might work for you. I’ll focus on one of t...