Science fiction and fantasy writers all have different methods for creating their worlds and people and getting them on paper, whether they set a special time of the day to write or a set number of pages to fill. I try and be at my desk ...

So, you just wrote your first science fiction novel. Your friend read it and told you that you were the next Ray Bradbury or Gene Roddenberry. Your fertile mind fantasizes your name up there on a Borders’ wall poster right next to images of Isaac Azimov and Jules Verne. Before going off the deep end and equating yourself with Hemingway and Steinbeck, give your ego a stiff reality check.

Few of us mortals are literary Mozarts that can plop down in front of a computer screen and author a perfect manuscript ...

You've got your own (or borrowed) world. You know the language. It's so well designed it'd put Tolkein to shame. You've got terms, you've got slang, you've got speech patterns. Your world has communications!

No, it doesn't. Not completely.

Language, speech, is just one method of communication, and there are many more methods. In designing your world, its inhabitants, its cultures, and in writing your stories ...

Are you aware how modern literary artists have brutalized fantasy by duping the public with elaborate lies about living people and passing them off as true stories? Did you know that Hollywood ...

5 ways to know if you have passive voice and fix it

Objects are acted upon
Limited Dialogue
Look for Was
A feeling of being in the past
The Answers
This article is a follow up on some of the topics I discusses in LWA V, but yet it deals with a type of voice that many beginning writers stumble into, and not by choice.

OBJECTS ARE ACTED UPON

Passive voice, unlike the more excited active voice, gives writing a sense of going no where. The bad thing is that most writers don’t even know their writing in the passive voice until it’s too late...when they finally relax and read their work. In passive voice everything just happens, and objects are acted upon. What do I mean by that? Look ...