Tag Archives: intermediate writing

Planning Longer Plots

February 18, 2010 – 3:18 pm

There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series:  1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch of stuff and then arrange it into a [...]

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Onward and onward

February 14, 2010 – 11:28 am

I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which aren’t really a multi-volume story so much as [...]

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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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First person, part the first

January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm

As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.
First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. [...]

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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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Looking Backward II, or Some Tenses and How to Use Them

November 24, 2009 – 11:26 am

The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what’s called the “historic present,” meaning that the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than He sleeps in the library all afternoon).
This confuses a lot of [...]

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Looking backward I

November 22, 2009 – 11:46 am

There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look.
FIrst, a definition: as far as I’m concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it were happening “now”. The central story that is being told, [...]

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Fantasy vs. Reality

November 17, 2009 – 11:45 am

Every so often, I get asked what the difference is between writing fantasy and writing realistic fiction. It’s a pretty good question, though since I’ve never written anything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I’m not sure why anyone expects me to know. (Of course, I have opinions on just about everything, but that’s another [...]

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Who’s THAT?

November 9, 2009 – 9:36 am

So you have a bunch of characters, and you want your readers to get to know them. How do you do that?
Well, how do you get to know people in real life?
You find out about them based on what other people say about them (””He’s a jerk!” Chris told her”), based on how other people [...]

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