Tag Archives: description

Building a world

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 [...]

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First person, part the second

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 [...]

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Who says?

December 15, 2009 – 11:13 am

When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options.
Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as the [...]

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But what does it look like? (A bit about description)

July 19, 2009 – 9:28 am

Description is one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Some readers want more, more, more; they want to see every button and bead on the dress, every scratch on the woodwork. Other people roll their eyes and complain about slowing down the story when they run across long passages of descriptive infodump. Still others want to have [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged | Comments (7)