Tag Archives: narrative summary

Making an impact

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 [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

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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Narrative Summary

August 24, 2011 – 6:30 am

Narrative summary is possibly the most flexible of the various ways of presenting a story. Narrative summary doesn’t necessarily tie the author down to chronological order, the way dialog and dramatization do, nor does it require a focus on one particular aspect of the story, as description often does. This makes narrative summary at once [...]

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Getting From Here to There

September 8, 2010 – 6:45 am

Transitions are a pain. It is very likely that I feel this way because I hate doing transitions, and the ones I write nearly always feel clunky to me. Some of the clunkiness is probably just my dislike of the process of producing one attaching itself to the finished product, but I don’t think all of [...]

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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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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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