It's time to start planning that story, but with so many aspects to creative writing and the creative process being such a subjective and mysterious thing, how do you plan? In this episode we explore the dimensions to a story and how to balance the discipline of structure with the flexibility to harness imagination ...
For the fiftieth episode I'm delighted to present an interview with Nebula and Hugo award winning author Nancy Kress. Nancy is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for PROBABILITY SPACE). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In 1998, Nancy married fellow SF writer Charles Sheffield, who died in 2002 of brain cancer. In 2011 she married writer Jack Skillingstead. They live in Seattle with Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle. ...
In episode 64 we looked at what we can do to build and enhance setting in a current project, and in this episode we look at some of the practices and habits we can adopt to help us invest as writers in future projects. We look at how, like the magpie, we need to be on the lookout for the 'shiny things' around us, the unusual the intriguing, the noteworthy. We also look at why it's good to put our research into the writer's equivalent of a compost heap where it can settle and mature into something truly useful for our writing. ...
