Like most members of my Clarion class, I'm reading some books by the 2009 instructors. The first one I finished was Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss.
( Spoilers under the cut )

At the end of the Wesleyan Writers Conference last week, the novelist Roxana Robinson gave us a recommended reading list, commenting: "If you haven't read all of them already, I envy you your future." I haven't read all of them (or even most of them), but given that she was teaching us about how to reveal character through dialogue, description and ( Read more... )

I just finished reading two novels, both of which struck me as excellent examples of characterization and/or voicing.

One is Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 2004. When I picked it up I didn't realize it was a sequel (to another Hugo award winner, The Curse of Chalion, which I haven't read) but ( Read more... )

A meditation about what "human" characters do in stressed situations, prompted by a diatribe of Harlan Ellison's.

About ten years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote a book called City on the Edge of Forever, after the1967 Star Trek (OS) episode of the same name.  In it, he detailed the writing process and especially the events which resulted in the script ( Read more... )