The Penguin

I'm no influential writer or editor, but I have been around the block a couple of times in both departments. Several obstacles to good writing seem to pop up, over and over again. I've made a quick catalog of the rookie mistakes I've seen, and hopefully my analysis is edifying: 1. Writing Genre The claim: "I don't write [insert genre here]. That's not where my imagination goes." It's all well and good to characterize yourself by the story you prefer. The problem comes in when you're so stuck in a genre rut, and limited by the confines of your particular hobbyhorse. I think the problem here is that writers forget that they write stories,  not genre.  In other words, they confuse the medium with the message. Think of stories as tetrapods - birds, mammals, or reptiles: they might have some huge differences between them, but as you dig down through their anatomy, you'll see that they have all the same basic parts. Whether swine or lizard, th...

I've been doing a lot of short comics stories lately - usually about 5 pages, although some are quite a bit longer. What I've realized is that certain genres are pretty tough nuts to crack, if you really want to do them right. One of the most difficult is the Time Travel story. Here's the problem: any story that involves time travel faces what I call "existential overload": if, say, an aspect of history can be changed (i.e., killing Hitler), then why not all of them? Why not a slurry of fanatical time-changers going back and changing things willy-nilly? How would this be regulated, except by a quasi-omnipotent order of "Watchers" who somehow ensure that time runs "correctly", whatever "correctly" means? Will only the time-changers know that history - and therefore existence - has been radically altered, or will everyone on earth retain their memories even when reality slips into a different mode? I ask all these questions becaus...