Creating Characters in Fiction
How do you create a memorable character? Think of people [...]
Mao’s Head: The Quest for the Perfect Title
“What’s in a title?” the former Durango author David Petersen [...]
A Study in Scarlett (Or: Can I Be Sued For Writing That?) Part 2 of 2
In Part 1 we discussed defamation. Today we’ll cover two [...]
A Study in Scarlett (Or: Can I Be Sued For Writing That?) Part 1 of 2
You’ve heard the horror stories. Scarlett Johansson sues acclaimed French [...]
How to Find a Literary Agent as an Established Author
There is a lot of advice out there for authors [...]
21st Century Medicine: New Ideas for Mystery, Metaphor, and Murder
At our monthly Four Corners Writers Workshop on July 16, [...]
Crime Fiction Enters the Sensorvault Era
The science of fingerprinting was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist who, beginning in 1888, published a series of monographs establishing that each individual’s prints are unique and that they remain so, unchanged, over a lifetime.
Grief and Imagination
I never imagined that The Shape of What Remains would resonate for so many in the first month of its public life.
Set Your Sights High, Don’t Settle For Anything Less
A friend is getting ready to teach an online college-level course about “the business of creative writing.”
The Second Thing That Happens
Your characters have attitudes before your story starts. Before page one and sentence one, they already have a strong point of view about the world. More specifically, they are evaluating how the world (the life all around them) is treating them.