Category Archives: General Writing Things

All writers, and smarty-pantses in general, naturally need to have a good working knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays.  There’s nothing worse than being at a dinner party full of literary types when someone brings up Shakespeare and getting confused about the difference between Henry V and Henry VI.  Then everyone titters at you, and you try to recover by comparing and contrasting Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but no one cares because neither of those guys are foundational writers of the English language and the whole evening is a disaster.  We’ve all been there.

So, to avoid that, and to avoid your needing to read a whole hell of a lot of plays, I point you this handy reference, a retelling of Shakespeare’s plays in 3-panel, stick-figure comic form.

I’ve always been intrigued by character names, since I feel like they have a significant effect on a story.  Not only that, but a person’s name can have a dramatic effect in real life as well.  So as a service to anyone engaged in naming someone, I’ll link to this handy guide.  It will help avoid accidentally calling your kid Compressed Flapwort, which is a good thing.  As Penn Jillette’s daughter can tell you, a proper name will take you places.

It can be tricky, these days of slipstream and cross-genre fiction, to figure out exactly how to categorize a new piece of fiction.  And of course, details of categorization can cause all sorts of kerfluffles.

But even as the question of where to shelve a given book has become arguably less important, there are still reasons to get the proper pigeonhole.  On the other hand, HP Lovecraft got along just fine for years while being miscategorized.

If you are a writer, you’re no doubt familiar with beer and coffee, but I’m afraid it is entirely possible that you are doing them wrong.  As we can see in this page, each has useful effects for the writer, but must be used carefully.  As near as I can tell, the aspiring writer is best off springing from bed in the morning and downing a few beers.  Then, as the ideas begin to flow, and before a general lassitude takes over, coffee should be applied to keep things cranking along.

Or, presumably, you could just keep downing coffee stout until that novel is finished.

According to this post by Scalzi, some authors don’t suffer from impostor syndrome.  Sorry, I just don’t buy that. Have Dunning and Kruger taught us nothing?