The other day, I posted on the idea of “widgets” for writers. Here’s an example: a double-widget focused on character development. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been taking a break and reading up on some of the subjects I need to know more about for the remainder of the book I’m working on. Namely, about The South Sea Bubble, early Georgian-era brewing and gin distilling equipment, theory, and practice, and the history of alchemy. Whilst reading up on the last of those topics, I ran across something quite fascinating when it comes to the connections between alchemy and literature, which any lit scholar can …

A while back, I started a series of posts on what I was then calling “Études for Writers.” I think that title is a mistake. I had reasons for choosing the title, of course, which I explained in the first post on the subject: basically, études are special kinds of exercises that marry technique to sensitivity to a theoretical structure. Just about every étude in my book of Ferling “studies” is designed to build specific musical-theoretical structures into your working muscle-memory: the rhythms, the harmonic and melodic structures (and phrasing and articulation) of traditional classical music, and so on: it’s all there. In other words, doing these …

In my last post in this series, I mentioned (and linked) the blog of my friend Ian McHugh, an excellent Australian SF/fantasy writer. I wanted to mention this post of his, regarding the usefulness (or uselessness) of word frequency analysis when trying to figure out what you’re doing unconsiously in your writing, as well as when thinking about character voice, but I felt it would distract from the etude I was discussion. Hence, another post. Interesting stuff, which I recommend you go check out. I may try to work up a new exercise based on it, if I can.

At Clarion West, our instructor–one of my favorite authors, the brilliant Maureen F. McHugh–suggested an idea to our class that seemed, when I heard it, to be self-evidently logical and obvious… except of course I’d never heard it stated explicitly before, or thought of it myself, and when she suggested it, my mind was also blown (to tiny bits, yes). We were discussing one of my classmates’ stories (one by this guy, and outstanding writer I must say, and  no relation to Maureen…). The story was very worldbuilding-heavy, and the plot was a little convoluted, and even the SF junkies in the class …