Monthly Archives: July 2012

Subplots

July 29, 2012 – 6:42 am

“subplot – a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work, usually involving characters of lesser importance (and often of lower social status).” – The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Subplots are one of the largest and most obvious differences between short stories and novels. There is rarely enough room in a [...]

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Micro and Macro

July 25, 2012 – 9:55 am

I apologize for being a bit late with this today. Revising a first draft is one of those things that sounds as if it’s easy to talk about until you try…and then once you start digging into it, you start wondering how it’s even possible to do, let alone define well enough to talk about. [...]

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Planning battle scenes

July 22, 2012 – 6:13 am

Back when I was writing my first novel, I got somewhere in the middle and realized I needed to write a battle scene. Not just a bar brawl or a fight between six of the good guys and ten or twelve bad guys; an actual clash of armies. Furthermore, the battle plan had to make [...]

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Random bad advice

July 18, 2012 – 6:19 am

One of the many things nobody warned me about when I was getting started was all the self-proclaimed “experts” who would show up and start giving me advice about my writing career, whether I wanted it from them or not. By and large, these are not people who have any actual connection to the actual [...]

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Show vs. Tell

July 15, 2012 – 6:25 am

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the two most misunderstood and misapplied pieces of writing advice that are commonly given to new writers (the other being “write what you know,” but that’s a different post.) It’s most commonly trotted out in relation to characterization, where “show” generally means “dramatize.” That is, rather than saying that [...]

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Reading like a writer

July 11, 2012 – 6:00 am

Back in the day, one of the pieces of advice I got that drove me crazy was “you have to learn to read like a writer.” I didn’t know what that meant, and no one ever really explained it to me. Evidently it was one of those things that was so obvious that everyone but [...]

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The First Veil

July 8, 2012 – 6:00 am

It’s pretty easy for most writers to get about four chapters into something based on an interesting idea/situation/character/plotpoint and a bunch of mysterious happenings. But somewhere around Chapter 4, one hits what has been variously termed “the wall,” “the first veil,” or “the first event horizon.” Sometimes it’s as early as Chapter 2; sometimes it’s [...]

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Query letter bad examples

July 4, 2012 – 6:00 am

A quick recap from last time: the primary principles to apply when writing a query letter are that you keep it short and specific; that the story synopsis matches the book; and that you are not coy in the manner of back-blurbs. Just in case somebody isn’t clear on this, here is a bad example [...]

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Query letter principles

July 1, 2012 – 6:00 am

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of queries about, well, queries. So I figure that it’s probably time to do a post on them, even though I feel like I’ve been talking about the “boring business stuff” an awful lot lately. Anyway, the first thing I’m going to say is that I am explicitly talking [...]

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