Years ago, a friend asked me why I enjoyed writing fiction. Somewhat facetiously, I said that writing fiction wasn’t as restricted by reality as nonfiction. That statement was truer than I realized. The artist recreates reality in his vision of what is important and significant. It is in this sense that when I write fiction,…
Like Justin Walker, the character of Pratik Shah was developed for my unpublished novel, The Wolverine. In the novel, Pratik was a star football player at The Ohio State University. He and Justin became close friends, and the two occasionally visited Justin’s family in north-central Ohio. During one of those visits, Pratik confessed that he…
I recently read an article about the process of writing a novel. When discussing character development, the author writes, “Perfect characters are boring…. Flaws create conflict. They drive decisions. They make your characters feel like real people.” I don’t want my heroes to “feel like real people.” I want them to be larger than life,…
Over the years, I have heard countless people express a desire to write a book. While that is certainly a laudable ambition, I am unaware of anyone who has actually written a book. I think a primary reason for this is they don’t understand a simple truth: writers write. And I speak from personal experience….
Justin Walker was created for the first novel I wrote. I intended for The Wolverine to be a thriller. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very thrilling. Or, to use a technical writing term, it sucked. Needless to say, it wasn’t published. Despite the results, the experience of writing the novel was valuable. In The Wolverine, Justin was…
When writing the first draft of a novel, I frequently think, “I didn’t see that coming.” A character says or does something I didn’t anticipate. When I have explained this to friends, they are surprised. They think I know the action and dialog that will occur in each chapter. While I know these things, it…
Good writing is organized, and an indispensable tool for organizing our thoughts is an outline. An outline is a road map for our writing, allowing us to identify a logical order to present the points we wish to communicate. As I noted in a previous essay, thoughts occur to us randomly. If we write in…
In a previous post, I briefly addressed psycho-epistemology—the interaction between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in the writing process. When we brainstorm, we must rely on the subconscious mind. The purpose of writing is to communicate. Effective writing makes it easy for the reader to comprehend the main point being communicated. This requires…
Like many people, I was outraged by the government’s response to the COVID pandemic. Businesses were forced to close, and it was easy to predict many of the problems that would ensue. Jobs would be lost, and many would be unable to pay their rent or mortgage. The government then compounded the problem by instituting…
One of the most important, and overlooked, aspects of writing is the relationship between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Ayn Rand called this psycho-epistemology, which she defined as “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” Psycho-epistemology does…
For forty years, I have written extensively about current events, with a focus on property rights. Much of my writing has addressed the flawed ideas underlying government and social policies, as well as the proper alternatives. While I found this intellectually stimulating, it wasn’t as satisfying as I had desired. Presenting alternatives to conventional ideas…