February 13, 2013 – 6:06 am
Every writer ends up writing about someone who isn’t exactly like them sooner or later – and it’s nearly always sooner, given the number of characters in the average novel. The minor characters, walk-ons, and even the important secondary characters can usually be fudged, but the main viewpoint character is another story. As a slight [...]
January 9, 2013 – 6:08 am
I spent last time talking about a manuscript full of stupid mistakes that didn’t work. This time, I’m going to talk about some where it does. Because in real life, people forget critical information, give in to impulses that turn out to be a Really Bad Idea, and generally do things that, if they’d stopped [...]
December 2, 2012 – 6:58 am
Every once in a while, I come across someone who has a blind spot for a particular major part of writing: description, emotions, action, internal monologue, or whatever. A lot of these folks think they can’t write because, without whatever it is they’re missing, their stuff doesn’t work…and they assume that if what’s missing doesn’t [...]
September 23, 2012 – 6:30 am
Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know that there’s a pause here, or a small [...]
The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.” OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of [...]
Most experienced writers know in their bones that plot operates in far more directions and on far more levels than most modern how-to-write books acknowledge. It’s the folks who’re just getting started who get bogged down in strict adherence to the basic skeleton or act structure, or worse yet, to one of the many and [...]
One of the things I inherited from my mother was her collection of writing textbooks. Most of them date from the 1940s and 1950s; a few are as recent as the 1970s. It’s fascinating to look at them, especially in light of my own far more recent collection, and see how teaching people to write [...]
January 8, 2012 – 6:34 am
When a writer has a big, complicated novel with lots of subplots and plot arcs that need to weave around each other, there are two main things he/she needs to do: 1) keep track of all the things that are going on offstage and in different plot arcs than whichever one is currently at the [...]
November 13, 2011 – 6:31 am
A novel is not a movie; writing a scene is not the same as filming one. It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all over the Internet, to the photo of Cousin [...]
When would-be writers ask “where do you get your ideas?” they are often asking the wrong question. They’re struggling to get started on a story, but they’re not actually starting from scratch. They have an idea. It’s just not enough to go on with yet. So what these folks really want and need to know isn’t [...]
“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who’s more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer [...]
Lately, I’ve been getting anxious queries from a lot of close friends, who know a) exactly when my book deadline is, b) just how many other desperately important things I have going on to distract me from writing, and c) how many plot threads I still have to wrap up. “How is the book going?” [...]
December 15, 2010 – 6:07 am
Having just talked a bit about beginnings, I’m now going to talk about endings…sort of. Specifically, I’m going to talk about chapter endings, because when you’re writing a novel, you end up having to do quite a lot of those. A good chapter ending, from the point of view of a writer, is one that [...]
November 24, 2010 – 6:30 am
As I’ve said before, the terms “viewpoint” and “point of view” can mean two different things: either the viewpoint character or the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person). I’m using it in the second sense today. Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most commonly used viewpoint in fiction. There are [...]
September 1, 2010 – 6:30 am
Humor has a reputation as one of the hardest and most under-appreciated types of writing there is. It’s a well-deserved reputation. Everyone over the age of five has at least watched someone else’s funny story fall flat, if not had it happen to themselves. And while you can find plenty of books on writing drama, [...]
Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing. The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in [...]
Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum – maybe just hair and eye color – and [...]
I’m currently just getting started on the third, as-yet-untitled book of the Frontier Magic trilogy, and the first step of that is working out the plot in more detail than “they explore the Far West to find out what happened to Lewis and Clark and what’s up in the Rocky Mountains; various characters solve assorted [...]
Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]
So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes. One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right? People who think [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Writing is difficult to talk about. I mean the real thing, the stuff that happens when you are sitting there with your paper and pen or your computer or your stone tablets and chisel and telling a story. We talk about bits and pieces of writing all the time. We separate out plot, characterization, setting, [...]
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 [...]
January 9, 2010 – 12:15 pm
It’s been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks. It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of [...]
I’ve been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer’s block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, “How do you know what happens next?” Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because “What happens next?” and “What do I do next?” are among the most [...]
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 [...]
One of the things you find a lot in writing books are prescriptions: This is THE (only right and workable best) way to write/develop a career as a writer. And they’re wrong. Or so I think, anyway. There is no One True Way to write. (This is practically my motto, and has been for years.) [...]
And now for a quick look through the mailbag (fixing the comments took longer than expected, but they finally seem to be working, yay!). Some excerpts that seem like a good idea to answer here: From several people: “Will you be autographing/appearing in X area soon?” Answer: If it’s not listed on the web site [...]