Category Archives: Writing

Telling Vs Showing, Or Is It?

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The advice is hammered into a baby writer’s head almost from Day One: “When writing anything,show don’t tell.”

I’m not the first to point out the following, but it bears repeating, so let’s think about this, shall we? And let’s begin with two character descriptions:

“Jim Bob Hattrick was the sort of man who would have everyone in the county attending his funeral, if only to see for themselves that the sumbitch was dead.”

“In orderly fashion, the long line of people in their Sunday best filed by Jim Bob Hattrick’s open casket. Some made a show of spitting on the corpse, but most were content to glare. No one cried, but a few did laugh.”

Which one is telling, and which one is showing? Continue reading →

Drowning My Sorrows – A Literal Interpretation

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At this week’s writer’s group meeting we were handed a challenge–write a flash piece around the old saw, “Drowning Your Sorrows” and given a fifteen minute time limit. For your potential amusement, here’s what I did.

Drowning My Sorrows

It was the opposite of transcendence – I wasn’t looking for unity with all things and detachment from the purely physical, rather I was taking something that had no separate physical existence and giving it form and substance. Something I could deal with. The other way was hard, took years and years of whatever it took. This had to be easier. Let other people seek enlightenment. Me, I had other priorities, and  I always took the easier way.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” Continue reading →

Public Face

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When I was eight years old it was fun to be the center of attention. At that age, and in your own opinion, you tend to be the center of the universe—or at least someone’s universe. Not always, certainly, but it’s common enough. You want to believe you’re a genius and gifted and destined for great things, because people will tell you so. At eight years old you’re pretty much all potential anyway, and therefore limitless. It’s a great feeling while it lasts. Continue reading →

Analyzing the Leaves and Missing the Forest

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I’m acquainted with some very smart people, and as a general rule I like to hang out with very smart people. For one thing, the conversational levels are usually higher. And, while nearly everyone has something  to teach, in general you’re more likely to learn useful things from people who are smarter than you are. One thing you eventually learn, as the Zen masters have known for centuries, is that intellect and analysis, wonderful tools that they are, sometimes just get in the way. You can wind up focusing your energy on understanding a description of a thing, rather than the thing itself. Naturally, the Zen masters’ “thing” was  satori . Here I’m talking about story, with the following example:

There’s a writer I admire. Call her Writer A. Sexes changed or not for demonstration purposes. There are several writers I admire, and what I’m saying here could apply to almost any of them. Anyway, I like this person’s work. Not in the “I wish I’d written that” vein, since if I were writing like this person I wouldn’t be writing like me, but in the “it’s always interesting to see the world through her eyes for a while” vein.

There’s another writer I admire a little less, call him Writer B. Continue reading →

More Incarnations Than Your Average Buddha

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You can read the press releases and such here, but the upshot is that a fan has acquired the trademark to Amazing Stories™ that its most recent owner, Hasbro, abandoned. The plan is to revive the magazine in some form which, if it happens, will probably cement Amazing’s record, not only as the oldest, but the most re-incarnated magazine the field has ever seen.

I’m nowhere near old enough to have been around during its original incarnation, the acknowledged first magazine ever devoted to science fiction, but I personally can remember four…no, make that five revivals (six if you count the short-lived TV series), though I’m not sure the most recent version should count. Regardless, it’s safe to say that Amazing has died and been reborn…a lot. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but there’s something about the field, nostalgia or blind optimism, that simply refuses to let it go. You can see some of the same dynamic in place with the venerable Weird Tales, which has gone away and come back almost as many times. Continue reading →