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, there’s [...]
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 many [...]
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 this [...]
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 like, [...]
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 different [...]
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, [...]