Tag Archives: intermediate writing

Accessibility in Fiction

August 8, 2012 – 6:04 am

First, a happy dance: NPR just put out a list of 100 Best Ever Teen Reads, and guess what ended up at #84? I’m scunnered. Happy, but scunnered. It’s a fabulous reading list; check it out. And thanks to anybody out there who nominated or voted for my books. Accessibility is one of those aspects [...]

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Old ways of looking at plot

June 3, 2012 – 6:49 am

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 [...]

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Thinking about first person

May 16, 2012 – 6:08 am

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, and first-person has been on my mind lately. First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that it allows for more believability, that it’s always [...]

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What Kind of Skeleton

May 6, 2012 – 6:38 am

I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic plot skeleton lately, for a variety of reasons, and I’ve been getting steadily more annoyed with most of what’s written about it, and about plotting in general. The trouble is that most of what’s written about plot and plotting is stuff that’s written after the fact – [...]

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How they say it

April 29, 2012 – 6:59 am

One of the things it took me a while to get a handle on was giving my characters different speech patterns, depending on both their personalities and their backgrounds. For my first couple of books, I was too busy juggling all the other stuff – background, plot, description, action, dialog, viewpoint, etc. – to even [...]

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Off Track

April 15, 2012 – 6:27 am

Before we get to the post, I feel obliged to mention that we’re doing some more blog maintenance tomorrow – might as well get it over with as soon/much as possible – so there may possibly be another short outage. We’re expecting this bit to go smoothly, but just in case it doesn’t, I figured [...]

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Fictional Families

March 21, 2012 – 6:07 am

Families are often hard to deal with, even if you love them. This is true in real life, but it’s even more true in fiction, especially in science fiction and fantasy. A large part of the problem is that including the hero/heroine’s family in the story means that the number of characters instantly begins to [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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The Lego Theory, Part 7

January 30, 2011 – 6:05 am

OK, you twisted my arm. But I’m stopping at scenes. Really. As I said, paragraphs are where this analogy switches from looking at building blocks to looking at what you are building out of the building blocks. Consequently, the main properties of paragraphs aren’t so much about the paragraphs as a unit; they’re more about [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 6

January 26, 2011 – 6:52 am

A quick recap, for those who are getting a little lost: Fiction (and the English language generally) is built up by combining smaller units into larger and larger ones according to various rules and principles, the same way you build large, intricate Lego models by putting a few relatively simple blocks together into more and [...]

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The Lego Theory Part 5

January 23, 2011 – 2:58 am

Clauses are the next step up from phrases, and they are intimately connected with sentences. They come in two varieties, independent and dependent, and the first sort is a sentence, or could be if you punctuated it differently. “He ran, but she escaped.” is a single sentence built out of two independent clauses with a [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 4

January 19, 2011 – 6:00 am

Before I go on, I would like to remind everybody once again that the vast majority of authors do not consciously and deliberately micro-manage their writing to wring every last bit of strength out of every word’s position, rhythm, etc. Most of the time, we work by feel – this way feels better/stronger than that [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 3

January 16, 2011 – 6:02 am

Every set of Legos has the basic square and rectangular blocks that you build most of your castles and dinosaurs and pirates with, and then a bunch of oddly shaped pieces that you use to make the fancy bits. Last post, I compared the basic Legos to the first four basic parts of speech – [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part II

January 12, 2011 – 6:13 am

Words, being the smallest and most basic building blocks of fiction, have lots of useful and important properties. I’ve already talked about specificity and sound; the next really key thing a writer needs to know about words is that they have different…strength or significance. I define strong words as “the ones people pay more attention [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 1

January 9, 2011 – 6:41 am

Fiction is like Legos. It’s built out of a series of different units, stuck together. Each new level of unit is built out of a clump of previous units. The more units you have, the more complex effects you can achieve by moving them around, putting them in different configurations, making different associations, etc. What [...]

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Implications

December 22, 2010 – 9:07 am

Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my social circles, so there were quite a few [...]

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Chapter’s End

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 [...]

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Necessary and Sufficient

October 3, 2010 – 1:56 pm

Back in high school, I had a marvelous history teacher who made a point of going into more than memorizing dates and names and places. One of the key things I took away from that class was the concept of necessary and sufficient causes, and the difference between them. Necessary causes are the things that [...]

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Funny Once, Funny Twice, Funny Forever

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, [...]

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Whose Turn Is It? (Mailbag #4)

August 18, 2010 – 7:32 am

From the mailbag:: I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character’s POV except when it’s absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I’ve also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC. Any guidelines on [...]

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Complicated Webs

August 1, 2010 – 7:45 pm

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 [...]

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Hup, Two, Three, Four

July 28, 2010 – 11:09 am

Pacing is movement, and movement has rhythm. Some rhythms are fast, staccato beats, rat-tat-tat-tat; some are slow, leisurely swells; and some are a steady heartbeat. One thing is true for all of them:  in order to have a beat, in order to have rhythm, there must be sound and then silence. A single continuous blast [...]

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Walk, Run, or Jog?

July 21, 2010 – 8:14 am

Recently, I was reading an extremely long (quarter-of-a-million-words plus) book that shall remain nameless to avoid embarrassing the author. It held my interest enough to get me through to the end, but it left me curiously unsatisfied, with very little memory of the plot (which is quite unusual for me), and no impulse whatever to [...]

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Changing things

July 4, 2010 – 6:00 am

Several questions come up a lot about plotting – how can you be sure it makes sense, how can you be sure it’s not clichéd, how do you develop it, how do you get it to work out. Most of the answers have to do with looking at things from a different angle from the [...]

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Recognizing “Good Writing”

June 6, 2010 – 8:00 am

A bit ago, I got asked to do my standard rant on this. I put it off ’til the book was done, but it’s done now. So here’s the short form: Read a story. Does it work? Yes? Then it’s good. The problem with the term “good writing” is that it assumes there is an [...]

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Meeting the cast

May 26, 2010 – 7:30 pm

How well does a writer need to know her characters? There seem to be two sets of conventional wisdom about this. One holds that writing characters is rather like method acting – the writer has to become the character, so as to know them from the inside. The other is more mechanical, and is typified [...]

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On critiquing

April 21, 2010 – 7:31 am

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, [...]

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The care and feeding of first readers

April 18, 2010 – 8:36 am

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 [...]

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Information and how to dump it

April 9, 2010 – 8:18 am

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 [...]

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Thinking it through

April 5, 2010 – 12:55 pm

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 [...]

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Good critique is hard to find

April 3, 2010 – 9:13 am

Getting good comments on a work-in-process is hard. In part, this is because a) many writers think that only other writers can/will provide useful criticism, b) most people are not writers, and c) people may be very good writers and still be very bad at providing critique. a) and b) mean that many writers limit their [...]

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Underneath it all

March 22, 2010 – 8:31 am

Theme is something I’ve been thinking about for years, because it’s one of those writing things that I can’t seem to ever quite grasp when it comes to my own writing process. Thanks to my excellent high school English teachers, I can pick out and analyze themes in other people’s stuff, but I never quite get [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The Devil’s in the Details

November 5, 2009 – 6:33 am

In the comments on our last exciting episode, accio_aqualung asked: So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is  terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in a very specific way or their uncle won [...]

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