Being a Better Writer: No Dice – Bringing Randomness Into Your Story

“I, at any rate, am convinced that [God] does not throw dice.”
—Albert Einstein

“The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.”
—Robert Coveyou

Welcome back, writers. It’s time for another installment of Being a Better Writer and—what’s that? I need to mention what’s happening tomorrow first? And after that lead-in with the quotes?

The dice say “Yes!” so we’re doing it. If you somehow missed it, my eleventh book, The Phoenix releases tomorrow. Yes, you read that right! September 16th The Phoenix drops out into the world, and everyone finally gets to find out how a man who can’t die goes about solving his own murder.

Like the premise? You should probably go pre-order the book, then. It’s a lot of fun. If you’ve never tried one of my books before, why make this the first one. Again, if that premise at all sounds like fun, go give it whirl. You’ll have a good time.

Okay, plug over. I know, but it’s not like book launches happen every day. Not for the same author, anyway. They’re big deals and signify the end result of a lot of hard work. Hundreds of hours. So when a launch comes along … We want to talk about it.

Oh, and there’s that and more discussed in last week’s news post. Go check it out if you’re curious what’s coming next.


“Okay, so … what’s the deal with today’s topic?” is what I’d ask if I’d not thrown the subtitle on today’s title. But as fun as just calling this post No Dice was, I figured a little more needed to be said.

In the same vein, I felt having those two quotes at the top were a great primer to getting people thinking about the subject for today. And let me tell you: Einstein may have been right about God not playing dice with the universe. But us mortals? Though we may be the “gods” of our stories … We play with dice all the time.

Or rather … we should. Hit the jump.

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