March 12, 2010 – 10:23 am
As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do: the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind.
The first and possibly most important thing to know about the [...]
“Outline - 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” - Oxford American Dictionary
If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. In [...]
This is the time of year when I run across folks - newly published writers, generally - who have forgotten one of the most basic facts about their writing careers, and who are about to pay a painful price.
What fact? The fact that they’re running a business, and they’re going to have to pay taxes on [...]
February 24, 2010 – 9:39 am
Real-life incidents aren’t all that useful in fiction, in my experience, because real life just sort of happens. Basing a piece of fiction too closely on real-life events and experiences all too often results in stories that don’t work, and which the author justifies by saying “But it really happened that way!”
“It really happened” is [...]
February 18, 2010 – 3:18 pm
There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series: 1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch of stuff and then arrange it into a [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:28 am
I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which aren’t really a multi-volume story so much as [...]
February 8, 2010 – 10:38 am
What makes an ending “The End”?
In a word: closure.
At the end of the story, whether the heroine won or lost, she’s not going to get another chance to try. The Evil Overlord is gone for good, the wedding is on (or off), the murderer has been discovered and arrested. There may be some loose ends, [...]
January 30, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the [...]
January 27, 2010 – 3:35 pm
Another thing that it is really important to pay attention to in first-person writing is what that character knows. Not what he/she knows about the plot; that should be obvious. About everything else.
When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans [...]
January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm
As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.
First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. [...]