Who do you write like?

This is a difficult question. Many trying-to-be-writers will leap onto a particular favourite author and say “I write like them!”. Once they’ve gotten a hundred thousand words down in various projects, I see these writers hesitate to be identified with a particular writer.

We all write differently. It’s a stupidly obvious statement, of course, because we are all different people. Different life experiences, different educations, different value systems. Yet we still want to write like a favourite writer.

The ups and downs of writing.

There is a phrase: “juggling precious eggs in variable gravity”. It has generally been ascribed to a character in a story co-written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, but Googling has so far failed to confirm this. Nevertheless, it is a useful phrase. It reminds me of writing.

There is so much to keep active when writing fiction, especially a longer piece, such a novel. Amongst the various eggs to be juggled are where the story is going, how the characters are developing and describing where they are. If you’re a writer, this should not be news. It’s not easy, either.

Review: American Gods

I picked up this book in a bookstore some months ago due to the fact I was in a bit of a buying mood and I’d never read any Neil Gaiman. His writing had basically passed me by somehow. But the Internet had made quite a big deal over the fact that he’d written the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife“. And I had definitely recognised this as a very special episode. So I bought “American Gods”.