A Couple Of Tips

I was going to trawl the news for something to blog about - but, of course, it's April 1, and...yeah.

(You can believe this blog - I personally don't find tricking somebody into believing a hoax particularly funny).

So, instead, I'm going to toss out a couple of writing tips:

1. Make sure that your background "crowd scene" isn't a sea of white faces. Readers will tend to assume that any character is the default - white and straight - unless specified otherwise. Particularly in science fiction, this can be very upsetting to non-white readers who wonder "where did we go?" It's worth taking the time to add a bit of diversity to your background characters and nameless NPCs - whether it's skin color, or tossing in disabled people. This kind of thing really does mean a lot.

2. If you have to write a trope, make sure you do it well. There's nothing wrong with "classic" stories, but archetypes become tropes when, to be blunt, people keep doing them badly.

3. Make sure your world is consistent within itself, especially in fantasy or far future science fiction. It's fine to break the laws of physics as long as you always break them in the same way.