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“Here there be dragons” is a phrase found on some old maps indicating dangerous, unknown, or unexplored territory. It was a symbolic warning of perils, though it was rarely meant to be taken literally by medieval mapmakers.

It’s not stretching things in the least to say we’ve entered very dangerous and unknown territory since Trump took office last year. We’re returning to a ‘might makes right’ ethos in international relations, were strong nations feel they have the right to do what they want to smaller countries, simply because they can. As one of Trump’s minions recently gloated, power is the only thing that matters. Everything else are just ‘legal niceties’. Worthless, in other words.

Here there be dragons indeed.

I’ve been writing sci-fi for twenty years now. My personal favorite is a series centered on aliens who love coffee and visit our planet to trade for it. It’s light-hearted escapism and definitely not meant to be taken seriously. It’s meant to give people a break from reality, to provide a mental and emotional reset.

I have an awful lot of fun writing these kinds of stories, and it gives me an important break from the daily barrage of unrelenting horrid news. I hope my readers find the same respite in them as I do.

Because somehow, every day the news manages to be worse than the day before. This past weekend my wife asked me, in all seriousness, when WW3 was going to start. She’s a very down-to-earth, gentle soul, who is not given to hyperbole. I’ve often asked myself the same question but never gave it a voice until last weekend.

The monsters are loose on the world stage and, as predators will do, they glory and luxuriate in their power to crush those who are weaker. And in the minds of men like Trump and his sycophants, weaker people and nations simply aren’t worthy of respect, life or liberty, for no other reason than they are simply weaker.

That’s why I believe we need fantasy stories and good satire now more than ever before. Chesterton said that, “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed”.

When the monsters are loose and the times evil, we need imaginative fiction to remind us that dragons can be defeated.

Thanks for visiting today. This is the first part of an article I wrote on Substack. You may read the full article for free here:

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I’ve been on a bit of a roll lately, posting tips on writing from world class writers. I’m doing this mostly for myself and the few writing friends I’ve managed to collect over the years as a way to keep these tips always easily accessible for them and myself. I have no illusions that these posts are reaching many others, as my website gets very little internet traffic. (I’m too cheap to pay the ridiculous costs to boost my Google rankings.) But if you are lucky enough to be one of the few who happen upon my little website, I hope you will find them helpful.

So here’s the next installment in my “Advice for Writers” series. Today I’m sharing some tips from George Orwell.

George Orwell, of course, needs no introduction. His classics, “1984” and “Animal Farm”, defined an entire literary genre. He gave these writing tips in an essay he wrote in 1946, “Politics and the English Language.”

So here they are, unedited and unadulterated:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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From Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” As always, I do my best to give credit where credit is due. I discovered these wonderful tips on The Gotham Writers website.

As always, have a wonderful day.

Or, why IMHO the best advice for new writers is no advice.

I was browsing through some old archived folders on my laptop the other day – yes, I was that bored – and came across a collection of writing tips I’d gleaned several years ago.

In my opinion #2 is the best, and #4 is also very good, but then these are tips from John Steinbeck, so who am I to judge.

Personally I still hold to what I wrote a couple of years ago, in which I argue that the best advice – for the new writer – is no advice. Don’t go around looking for advice or attending writers conferences. Don’t do any of that until you’ve finished a complete full length novel. Until then, just write. You need to make all your own mistakes, and experience the struggle first hand, before any advice will make sense. Until then it’s just theory. Once you’ve completed a novel to the best of your ability, then you’ll be better able to appreciate just how brilliant Steinbeck’s advice really is. Because it really is.

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Credit: by Maria Popova

6 Tips from John Steinbeck

If this is indeed the year of reading more and writing better, we’ve been right on course with David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, and various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes John Steinbeck — Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel laureate, love guru — with six tips on writing, culled from his altogether excellent interview it the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

But perhaps most paradoxically yet poetically, twelve years prior — in 1963, immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception” — Steinbeck issued a thoughtful disclaimer to all such advice:

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

Some Links to More Great Tips from Literary Icons

If you feel bold enough to discount Steinbeck’s anti-advice advice, you can do so with these 9 essential books on more and writing. Find more such gems in this collection of priceless interviews with literary icons from half a century of The Paris Review archives.

Credit: Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

Thanks for reading today’s post. It’s been fun!