World Building: Making Tough Choices

Hello Beardies, 

You’re familiar with the iceberg analogy: only a small fraction of the whole is visible on the surface. It applies to people, art, sports, nature, and it applies to world building. You, dear writer, should have, floating about in your brain, a berg-size mass of knowledge about the world in which your story takes place. This knowledge informs your writing and adds layers of richness to the story. Even so, only a small portion of that iceberg will surface in the story. And that means you have to make choices.

Which details about your world will get page time and which will you leave out?

 It’s a dilemma, for sure. And when life gives you dilemmas, make dilemmanade. (All together now: GROAN!)  The pun may be bad, but the point is valid. If you use this challenge to think carefully about the choices you’re making as a writer, your story will grow stronger. Here are some ideas for doing just that:

Book Spotlight: Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles, Book 1) by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Good evening, Beardies!

As a librarian, I know there’s a hard and fast honor code when it comes to movie adaptations of books: Read it before you see it. Tonight’s Spotlight book, Beautiful Creatures, came out in the heyday of young adult paranormal romance. At the time, I was heartily sick of paranormal love stories and let this book pass me by without even a second thought. When the movie came out though, I became honor-bound to read it—especially when my friends gave me a copy for my birthday and made me promise to read it so we could go see the movie together.

Book Spotlight: The Postmortal by Drew Magary

Guten Tag Beardies!

It’s not often you encounter a book that stays with you weeks, even months after you read it, and when you do, it’s a treat like nothing else. The Postmortal is the first novel from Drew Magary.