FANTASY

I try never to let my writing get formulaic. You may notice that these paragraphs are all the same length for reasons that have nothing to do with content limitations on this page. Votes.cgi is a directory on the server so I am not writing to fit into a database design limitation. This regularity has nothing to do with the story and is a quirk in my personality like the quirks you will discover in yourself later on. What I mean by formulaic is that I try never to write a story to a plan that I created for the story.

What is your goal when you sit down to write? I want to go on an adventure and take my audience with me. Therefore, that is how I write. My stories start out as ideas that I follow around in their own little worlds. A story reads best when you write what you know.

How do you write what you could not possibly know? Make the world real enough to live in it for a little while. Do not sit at a calculator and try to figure things out. Your audience will not share that experience. Follow your characters around and make sense of their worlds.

When you ask a question, you should have an answer that is believeable. Time can stand still until you come up with something. You may have to move things around and come up with a few good excuses. Odds are that nobody else will think of the questions that never come to you when you are writing. Let the story live itself out so it will appear real enough to have lived itself out.