Tag Archives: tools

So the next thing that happens is…

March 12, 2010 – 10:23 am

As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do:  the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind.
The first and possibly most important thing to know about the [...]

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A Line Around the Outer Edge

March 7, 2010 – 10:33 am

“Outline - 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” - Oxford American Dictionary
If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. In [...]

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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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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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He said, she said

December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm

A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it.
“Run!” Jeff cried.  (”Jeff cried” is the speech tag.)
Jane said, “I can’t.” (”Jane said” is the speech [...]

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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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Did They Have Birds in the Fourth Century?

October 31, 2009 – 8:38 am

“How could you write about anything without wondering if it was true? I mean, you’d be describing a bird in a garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” (Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, Harpers, 1965)
One of the things my mother never understood [...]

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What do you do with your ideas once you have them?

October 18, 2009 – 6:08 pm

Once you “have an idea,” the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story.
How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting ideas [...]

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Where do you get your ideas?

October 16, 2009 – 12:32 pm

The single most common question people ask writers - especially SF/F writers - is “Where do you get your ideas?” The assumption always seems to be that ideas are hard to come by.
But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard.  For instance, anyone can sit down and come up with a grocery list. [...]

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