Monthly Archives: April 2010

Lights, camera…Part III

April 29, 2010 – 12:50 pm

I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning. What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is [...]

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Lights, camera…Part II

April 27, 2010 – 10:57 am

So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level. Action can be “seen” by the reader from lots of [...]

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Lights, camera…what?

April 24, 2010 – 7:35 pm

Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they’re pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I’ve said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that’s full of how-to-write books – five shelves of them – and couldn’t find [...]

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On critiquing

April 21, 2010 – 7:31 am

Before you start critiquing someone else’s work, you are best off asking a few questions. Not questions about the story – usually, one of the things the writer is looking for is a fresh eye, a virgin reader, someone who has no idea what the story is about or what the writer was trying to accomplish, [...]

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The care and feeding of first readers

April 18, 2010 – 8:36 am

I promised a while back that I’d post on training first-readers (or beta readers, or critiquers, or whatever you personally call them). I already talked about the difficulty of finding good crit, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of that. Working with first-readers starts with finding some folks who are  a) articulate people whose [...]

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One down, many to go…

April 14, 2010 – 4:07 pm

I am home again after another four-day trip to Chicago to get my Dad’s taxes signed and meet with the lawyer about family business stuff. I am more than a little chuffed, because this is the first time in at least six years that Dad hasn’t needed to file an extension. (You all did notice [...]

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Information and how to dump it

April 9, 2010 – 8:18 am

Infodumps – those long passages of narrative summary that provide a huge wodge of background or plot development or characterization – have an undeservedly bad reputation among would-be writers. The allergy to infodumps is a bit of stylistic advice which is largely peddled to beginning writers, but which is not upheld by looking at real [...]

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Thinking it through

April 5, 2010 – 12:55 pm

I seem to have acquired a reputation as some sort of worldbuilding maven, probably based on the Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions I came up with as a personal crutch during my middle career. I don’t actually think the reputation is deserved – really, it should belong to someone who does a much better job of worldbuilding [...]

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Good critique is hard to find

April 3, 2010 – 9:13 am

Getting good comments on a work-in-process is hard. In part, this is because a) many writers think that only other writers can/will provide useful criticism, b) most people are not writers, and c) people may be very good writers and still be very bad at providing critique. a) and b) mean that many writers limit their [...]

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