The stories of Bryan Young

I'm of the considered opinion that in order to be a good writer, you need to be a voracious reader. It's how we, as writers learn. There's no way an architect could become a better architect without inspecting the plans of other architects and keeping up on what's going on in advances in the industry. There's no way a doctor could stay up on current science and medicine if they didn't have to trade notes and do continuing medical education to keep their licenses. For writers, reading is our continuing education. It's not something that's mandatory for us, either. And it's not just books about craft, we need to be reading all kinds of books. Because all of them, good or bad, within our genre or not, will teach us something about what we're doing. I love reading. And I am constantly analyzing what it is writers are doing in their texts. That's my version of pleasure reading. If you're not in love with that analysis and deconstruction,...

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to read a book from an acquaintance. They'd been religiously promoting their book and I decided I would give it a shot. Sadly, I never made it past the free sample that Amazon offered. What I was most shocked by is that this book made it through editors and was published by a publisher. Which is a different lesson: watch out for scam publishers, though I'm not sure who got scammed harder here, the author or the publisher. The writing was largely incomprehensible, the repetition of words was the mark of a middle-school writer, the scene setups and action descriptions sounded more like a game master bluffing their way through a scene they have no idea about. The characters were paper thin, the diversity was lacking in every significant degree. In fact, the only female character in the preview was a victim of severe male gaze in a situation the author seemed to have no first-hand experience with, either. The preview was littered with errors o...

As many of you might know, Origins Game Fair is a convention I've been doing for the last four or five years now. Although the brunt of the convention programming is based in table-top games, there is a healthy writing track that includes people like Michael Stackpole and Timothy Zahn. Margaret Weiss is joining the "Library" this year. And then there's me. I do a lot of writing panels (which you will see below) and I think it's one of the most fun conventions I've ever been to. If you're in the Columbus, Ohio area and you're here for Origins, come by. I'll be signing and selling books at my table in the exhibition hall whenever I'm not on a panel. It starts tomorrow! The schedule is also subject to change, so you might see me pop up where you might not expect! THURSDAY  11 a.m. Character Building, Heroes and Villains Learn to craft a protagonist who will catch and hold your readers’ attention, not just with heroics, but with fla...

Last night was a great night. It was the last official shoot for my short film. It was a reshoot, though, and that gave me the vague sense of deja vu. It's expensive and time-consuming to reshoot something. There are a lot of balls to keep in the air. Not only do you have your cast and their schedules to juggle, you have your camera people, makeup department, sound person, etc.. You also have your own time you have to manage. It's a difficult thing to get a group of adults that large together for anything let alone something that even mildly resembles work. So when you call everyone and ask to do something over, it's a big deal. But the end product is going to benefit for it so much, even if it's hard, so you do it, right? That's what this night of reshoots reminded me of in my writing. Sometimes it's just so hard to redo a scene or a piece of the structure. Every moment ripples toward others and, in a long book, a minor change at the beginning could ...