Thought-Drive

I saw my first author information sheet more than a few years ago. It asked questions about the main characters, what they looked like, the setting of the story, and what I wanted my cover to look like. To say I didn't know about any of that would be an understatement. I knew who the characters were, what they looked like, but I knew so little then about covers that it may as well have been nothing. When I finally got into rounds of revision with the cover artist I began to understand the difficulty of two people trying to share the same vision. I understood what my theatre friends told me about artistic collaboration, and why it was it important, and how it could be so difficult. And that was way, way before anyone broke down for me why some covers sell, why some don't, and what a reader is actually shopping for when they're scrolling through images that represent books they might buy and read. Today, after days of scouring portfolios and reading reviews and re-reading ...

On Friday I had another opportunity to talk to creative writing class at a local high school. The teacher expressed the writers taking the course having some issues with their worlds being believable, and being unable to tell what changes are needed to create immersive settings. So, I went in and talked to them about suspension of disbelief and immersion and internal logic. I had them do a writing exercise about a character's day in the life in a world just like ours except for one specific change (one group opted for everyone being born with a third arm, and the second group voted for dinosaurs never dying out), after which we discussed things they learned when it came time to start putting words on paper. It was my contention then, and continues to be, that actually putting lessons into use is where the learning lives. I was happy that they had questions after the fact, that they realized some things about the difficulty of what they were attempting (turns out a slightly differe...