Tag Archives: intermediate writing

Not Flashing Back

January 15, 2012 – 6:40 am

Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers’ tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they’ve been overused and abused recently or not. They’re a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly important incident or incidents from the characters’ backstory [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (8)

Weaving (plot) threads

January 4, 2012 – 6:18 am

First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) [...]

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Beats Now and Then

October 30, 2011 – 6:54 am

“Beat” is actually an acting term. In a movie or play, it describes a brief interruption or pause in the action or dialog. The result of putting a beat in can change the emphasis on a line of dialog or the meaning of an action, and do it extremely economically. The detective’s moment of stillness [...]

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Deeper still

August 21, 2011 – 6:54 am

Years ago, before I was ever published, I was at a convention where Gordy Dickson was answering writing questions for a mob of would-be hopefuls. And somebody asked the “how do I write deep characters?” question, and I was kind of disappointed in the answer, because it was all basic stuff I already knew. I [...]

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Depth

August 17, 2011 – 6:49 am

Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters - so the reader is rooting for them?
This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it’s something that took me a long time to [...]

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Support systems

July 10, 2011 – 6:54 am

One of the things 4th Street Fantasy Con did this year was a workshop on writers’ support systems, which I participated in. I did a lot of thinking about the topic, and it occurred to me that most of my blog readers probably weren’t there and could use the information (and besides, it means I [...]

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On Characters

June 5, 2011 – 6:19 am

There are four really, really important things to remember about characters:

Characters are people. (Yes, even if they’re aliens or elves or talking rabbits.)
People, and therefore characters, are all the same.
People, and therefore characters, are all different.
Most important of all: Every person, and therefore every character, is an individual.

Taking these assertions in order: Characters are people [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (5)

What’s not there

May 1, 2011 – 6:37 am

Fiction is a model of human behavior (among many other things, but this is where I’m going today). This means that no matter how a writer tries, real life and real people are always more complicated than whatever is in the model. Nevertheless, we do everything we can to make stories as “real” as we [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Comments (16)

Sax and violins

February 20, 2011 – 6:35 am

A long time back, a friend of mine (tongue firmly in cheek) told me that when it came to fiction, all the trashy stuff was full of sex and violence, while all the great literature was about love and death.
The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have - sex and [...]

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The Lego Theory Part the Last

February 2, 2011 – 6:40 am

This is the last of this series of posts. Really. I mean it.
Part of why it’s the last is that I’m up to scenes, and I’m not really sure I can take this analogy this far, let alone any farther. Paragraphs were OK, because they’re the linking point between the basic blocks of language - [...]

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