A while ago I was brainstorming on a new sculpture series I want to do. I started writing up detailed descriptions of the characters I wanted to sculpt, kind of to give me a better mental picture of them before sculpting. This little diversion lead to working on expanding some of the descriptions into short stories in which they could appear and do stuff and have stuff happen to them. So now I'm working on making the stories read properly with a final goal of submitting them to Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, etc.
My specific interests for writing are short stories of supernatural fiction and Sword & Sorcery adventures - the classic pulpy stuff - the only stuff I read. I'm not interested in avantgarde wordsmithery that lays bare the soul of the world, I just wanna make stuff that's fun to read but I wanna do it properly. I'll leave the deconstruction of a teardrop to the true arteests...
So, I've been buying a series of Elements of Fiction books published by Writers Digest which detail specific topics like: Plot & Setting, Description, Dialogue, Charachter Archetypes, Conflict, Action and Suspense, Character Emotion, etc. These seem very helpful but I was wondering if anyone else here is doing some writing, specifically short fiction and what books you might recommend? There's tons of those cheesy "How to write a bestseller in 30 days, A successful novel the easy way, Your story will make you rich, etc" books out there, I'm not interested in those kinds. But books that you've found helpful I'd be interested to hear about.
My specific interests for writing are short stories of supernatural fiction and Sword & Sorcery adventures - the classic pulpy stuff - the only stuff I read. I'm not interested in avantgarde wordsmithery that lays bare the soul of the world, I just wanna make stuff that's fun to read but I wanna do it properly. I'll leave the deconstruction of a teardrop to the true arteests...
So, I've been buying a series of Elements of Fiction books published by Writers Digest which detail specific topics like: Plot & Setting, Description, Dialogue, Charachter Archetypes, Conflict, Action and Suspense, Character Emotion, etc. These seem very helpful but I was wondering if anyone else here is doing some writing, specifically short fiction and what books you might recommend? There's tons of those cheesy "How to write a bestseller in 30 days, A successful novel the easy way, Your story will make you rich, etc" books out there, I'm not interested in those kinds. But books that you've found helpful I'd be interested to hear about.