Welcome
Welcome to Words Deferred. I’m Sam Johnston. I write software by day, and fiction by night.
I post about the art and craft of writing fiction. I also post serial fiction – novels, one bite at a time – and take you behind the scenes to look at my writing process.
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Recent Words
New blog posts every Monday morning. New serial fiction or writing process journals every Friday morning. Other stuff on Wednesdays, sometimes!
Word Count Isn’t Everything
After months of outlining, planning and prep, I’m now putting words on the page for Razor Mountain, but my daily word counts are pretty low. I’m only averaging a few hundred words per day. If writing were a competitive sport, you might not want me on your fantasy team*. Writing Twitter is full of authors […]
Razor Mountain Development Journal #41
This is part of my ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Be forewarned, there are spoilers ahead! You can start from the beginning here. Last Time I wrote part of the first pass at chapter one, and thought about the bits I want to write and polish before […]
Reblog: “On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story” — Lincoln Michel
We’ve talked in the past about engines that power story: types of conflict and creating and resolving tension. Today, I want to point you to Lincoln Michel’s great article about the false dichotomy between character-driven and plot-driven fiction. Lincoln argues that there are an almost infinite number of engines that can drive a story, and […]
The Archives
- September 2021
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- December 2020
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- September 2020
