Could all your characters fit right in at your local mall? Even if you've set them in 10th century Italy or modern-day Russia...or on another planet? Need some help giving your characters the diverse backgrounds REAL people have? Pro novelist Holly Lisle walks you through her quick, fun, and practical system for developing cultures that feel real. You'll learn to create religions, philosophies, governments and lifestyles different than your own to add compelling conflict and an "I want to go there" feel to your stories. Holly Lisle's Create A Culture Clinic is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre, and for every experience level—-from absolute beginner with no idea how cultures work, to published pro wanting to add depth and beauty to a book.
Author
Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series. Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows: “So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived. “My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks. “It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.” “Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next. ” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’ “The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down. “We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget. “I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.” You can find Holly on her personal site: Hollylisle.com You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site: CadenceDrake.com You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here: The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.
