Category: The Writer’s Craft

(Beth Turnage Blog) There’s an ongoing argument in writing communities about whether artificial intelligence can write good fiction. The usual objections are familiar. AI produces bland prose. It relies on predictable plots. It doesn’t understand human emotion. It smooths away unusual twists and turns in favor of conventional storytelling....

(Beth Turnage Blog) Years ago, Chuck Wending would sponsor a weekly storytelling contest on his blog Terrible Minds, based on prompts he posted, which was a lot of fun. Then he gave it up. Awww. Now that I have my aggregatory SFFBloggers up and running, I had a wild...

What Makes a Writer? The making of a writer involves both nature and nurture. Scientists have found highly creative people’s brains are structured differently from those of less creative individuals. The building blocks of creativity in writers are often hardwired, influenced by how their brains process neurochemicals even before...

The following is from my post on Quora responding to this question: Do writers and authors write out an outline of their novel first? How detailed is the outline? Whether to outline or “pants” (meaning to write by the seat of their pants) is individual to each writer. Some...

One of my writing friends on FWO asked me to write about I how I organize my work so that I’m productive in my ghostwriting business. Everyone has their own writing process. What works for me may not work for you. But I’m glad to share my tools to...

Like a pinball, your story bounces around in your head, hitting your occipital lobe, hippocampus, and the front of your brain, lighting them all up with the act of creation. If you are a master writer, you light up the caudate nucleus, which handles skills gained over time. Creating...

Having worked as a ghostwriter for eight years, writing nearly every day while working quickly and efficiently sparked my need to develop ninja wordsmithing skills. And for this, I turned to machine-editing tools. When I first started, I suffered some backlash from my writing friends. The common sentiment was...

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(Beth Turnage Blog) I’ve written several posts on Quora on writing and thought I’d curate some here. You can call it laziness, but really it’s a lack of time since ghostwriting is keeping me very busy. Really. 😉 How do word count limitations affect what you can fit into...

(Beth Turnage) I’ve written posts on Quora on writing and thought I’d curate some here. You can call it laziness, but really it’s a lack of time, since ghostwriting is keeping me very busy. Really. When writing, how do you grab your reader’s attention as quickly as possible? How...