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 Greg’s [...]
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 [...]
“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 draws [...]
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 seemingly [...]
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 [...]