Category Archives: creativity

Narrative flashbacks and flashforwards

When I started my latest draft of my novel, I decided to try some flashbacks and flashforwads to get the main cast in front of my readers and all the elements of my story out in front of my readers within the first fifty pages. It re-energized me initially, but now I wonder if I’m …

February 18, 2010 – 2:09 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Wow…

Good ideas are as hard to come across as affordable Ferrari parts. But after I posted it, I realized I kind of stumbled across one. That thing I wrote about a kid with seemingly incurable acne, but who finally finds something that starts to work, but with dark consequences? That’s pure gold, now that I …

December 14, 2009 – 3:48 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Uniqueness is the key to memorable characters

Quite often, writers meet eccentric characters in real life but then hesitate to make their own characters quite so quirky. And yet it is the quirkiness in characters that makes them memorable. Nearly two decades have past since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks hit the airwaves, and I can still recall unique characters like the Log …

December 14, 2009 – 3:39 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Lots of sermons, not a lot of fiction

In the past couple weeks, despite my main PC being down for half that time, I have accomplished a lot of writing. I have all of two commentaries done and a third one nearly complete; then I have a couple sermons to write. It’s a lot of fun writing sermons, but I’m itching to get …

November 26, 2009 – 2:29 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Writing the familiar

One of the worst things I think a writer can do is limit themselves to the scope of their own experience. Many people suggest, “Write what you know,” and yet this advice is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. You see, some of the greater works of literature were about things that no one could ever reasonably …

September 23, 2009 – 1:29 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Write it out…

I was browsing dog supplies at PetSmart when inspiration arose within me; suddenly, out of the blue, I’d solved a motivation for one of my characters. Sometimes it can happen like that. Most of the time, however, the only real way to solve a character problem is to put one’s nose to the grindstone and …

September 23, 2009 – 1:06 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Reading good writing inspires

Reading good writing has always inspired me to get cracking on whatever writing project I’m working on at the moment. That’s been true lately. I just read the first chapter to Charlaine Harris’ upcoming Grave Secret, available on her Web site, and it made me want to fire up MS Word 2007 and work on …

September 7, 2009 – 3:27 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in Charlaine Harris, creativity | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Sinking into the heads of your characters

Charlaine Harris is a great example of a writer who can make each of her characters sound different. That’s an essential skill when one indulges in first-person narration. The deal is not to concentrate so much on the Drew Estate, the murder weapon or the victim so much as to concentrate on the inner workings …

September 2, 2009 – 12:01 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Finally making progress again

I’m finally making progress again on my first Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less. Longtime readers will remember I lost over 100 surplus pages of manuscript during a hard drive crash in which I had no data backup. It’s been a long road toward working up the energy to tackle the novel afresh, …

May 18, 2009 – 2:31 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

All the memory you’ll ever need

Sometimes I like to think about an exchange I had with my uncle Kenny many years ago. A draftsman and engineer, he fell in love with the Commodore Amiga 128. The computer, had twice the RAM of the Commodore 64k, a whopping 128K. And he had just added on a new accessory, a 16MB external …

March 25, 2009 – 10:13 PM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (1)

A fat-burner for the mind

One of the best ways to cure writers block is to read extremely good writing. Now, I’m not talking about reading someone else’s work at then sitting down and doing something just like what that did. No, what I mean is that sometimes you just need a fat burner for the mind. And for me, …

January 26, 2009 – 3:56 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Struggling with the supernatural

Lately it’s been easier to write about diet pills that work than to make progress on my mystery novel, Thirty Minutes or Less. I’m in a delicate point in the novel where I need to lay the groundwork for the supernatural elements to come, while still grounding the series in a very realistic world. Also, …

November 17, 2008 – 4:49 AM | By Craig Hansen | Posted in creativity | Tagged , | Comments (0)