[This is a reposting of a piece that was originally published on the Cochise Writers blog on September 10, 2011.]

Before I get to the first real topic in this series, I need to give a shout-out to local writer/poet/editor Harvey Stambrough for a blog post that he put up yesterday, “A Dozen Ways to Make Your Critique Group Work.” Good stuff there. Well worth your time to follow the link and give it a look.

New members of a critique/writers’ group will say, “I don’t know how to do this [provide feedback].” The tendency, I suspect, is to think they have to replicate what they had to do in high school and/or college English classes: things like identify and explain the symbolism in a passage, say, or compare and contrast the use of metaphor with onomatopoeia.

Nope! Nope, nope, nope...

Ever had one of those story ideas that just wouldn’t leave you alone? Or woke you up in the middle of the night? Great, isn’t it? Writers love those ideas.

That’s how my debut novel, The Eternity Plague, got its start.

Sometime in the fall of 2003 (October, maybe?) I woke up early in the morning, thinking about what would happen if people suddenly became immortal, without having done anything to earn or deserve it. Finding the secret to immortality, only to discover there’s a high price to be paid for it, paying it, and then being left to wonder—for the rest of eternity—whether it was worth it or not is an old idea. Robert Silverberg told it in The Book of Skulls.

What kept me awake until I got up and wrote it down, however, was the twist of immortality just happening...

Welcome to the new and improved, or at least changed, version of Great Stuff for Writers! We’ve got 10 terrific posts on character development (and bumping them off), publishing and publicity tips, book design hints, and some thoughts on the life of a writer. Enjoy!

CRAFT

I’m not a fan of the 20- (or 200-) questions approach to character development, but thriller writer Tom Pawlik (@TomPawlik) offers 9 Ingredients of Character Development, centered around using the word character as the mnemonic for the ingredients. Maybe it’ll work for you.

Speaking of characters, what happens if they refuse to do what you want them to? That’s great! James Scott Bell (@jamesscottbell) provides sound advice on The Kill Zone on how to Let Your Characters Live and Breathe, particularly for those of u...