Research and Responsibility.

One of the most important things about writing, along with knowing your craft, and basic good English, is research. That is where you begin to learn what you need to fill your stories with facts, images, and ideas that work.

I first wanted to become a writer when I was nine years old and reading Walter Farley’s Black Stallion novels and Terhune’s collie books. When I was thirteen, I realized that in order to write about things, I needed to know about things. That was when I started my first summer project. Since war had always intrigued me, I narrowed it down to guerrilla warfare and filled a notebook with paragraphs and quoted that I jotted down while spending long, happy days in the local library. Every summer I learned something that I could not learn in school at that age.

A single summer of research could produce an endless amount of stories using the information I had gathered.

Why bother with research and learning? While one of the principal parts of a book or story is a process called “Willing Suspension of Disbelief.” That means that the reader is allowing you to convince them for the duration of the read, that the story is real in their imagination. When a reader finds errors in either the text or the facts or the structure of the story, most of the time they simply stop reading and never come back to it. Worse, once a reader hits that bump in the road, they will never want to read that writer again. Usually you only get a single shot at it. You miss, and then your quarry, the reader, runs away and you can never capture their attention again.

Know your subject matter. Know how to write well. And if you are still in school, stay there and work your butt off. You only get out of it what you put into it. You, as the writer, are responsible to your reader to put the fullest competence, both of facts and stylistically into your work that it is possible to achieve


Some brief creds, a partial list

articles published in:
Movieline
Cinefantastique
Washington Post Book World
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Drive Guide
Black Belt
Martial Arts Weapons
Monsterland
Thrust: Science Fiction in Review
Science Fiction Review

Former MPAA Accredited Journalist.
Currently Active member, SFWA, HWA