Tag Archives: tools

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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Layering

April 18, 2012 – 6:08 am

One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the [...]

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Out of ideas?

April 11, 2012 – 6:30 am

So Minicon was last weekend, and in among seeing lots of friends (and managing to miss seeing far too many others) there was the usual crop of questions – what are you going to write next, where do you get your ideas, etc. Including one poor fellow who was convinced that he’d run out of [...]

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More on Prologues

January 22, 2012 – 6:30 am

The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the viewpoint of one central character and takes place [...]

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The Problem with Prologues

January 18, 2012 – 6:26 am

Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times, not so much…and the problematic usages reinforce the [...]

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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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Misunderstanding grammar

January 11, 2012 – 6:48 am

Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer’s thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he’s trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting rant. My apologies in advance. This particular comment [...]

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Keeping track

January 8, 2012 – 6:34 am

When a writer has a big, complicated novel with lots of subplots and plot arcs that need to weave around each other, there are two main things he/she needs to do: 1) keep track of all the things that are going on offstage and in different plot arcs than whichever one is currently at the [...]

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Metaphorical manuals

December 21, 2011 – 6:30 am

This summer, I got a new car. Well, new to me – it belonged to Dad for several years, until he decided that with Mom gone, he didn’t really need two cars and he liked the other one better. Anyway, it’s a 2008 model, with lots of snazzy bells and whistles that I’ve never had [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Fantastic history

October 26, 2011 – 6:13 am

This was supposed to go up Sunday; apparently being out of town glitched my brain and I managed to get it written but not posted. Sorry about that. We now return to our regular posting schedule. I’m in Tulsa at the moment, at the Nimrod conference, and yesterday they had me do a session on [...]

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Hack Writer’s Gambit

October 2, 2011 – 6:17 am

The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing various bad-plotting mistakes made in various TV series, specifically the sort that used to be called “hack writer’s gambit.” I say “used to be called” because a quick series of googles found very little in the way of modern references for the term. So I’m [...]

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Gaming for Writers, or Writing for Gamers

September 21, 2011 – 6:15 am

I’ve been doing role-playing games off and on since the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to the concept of D&D style tabletop games. The group I gamed with wasn’t big on number-crunching and stats; we were more about the improvised story-telling. At least five of us ended up inventing and running our own gaming [...]

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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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Surprise and Suspense

June 22, 2011 – 9:57 am

Alfred Hitchcock gave a famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense. It boils down to this: If a bunch of guys are playing poker and suddenly a bomb goes off under the table, that’s a surprise. It’s not what the viewer expects. If, however, the viewer knows the bomb is there from the [...]

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Where one writes

June 15, 2011 – 6:42 am

Writing is one of the few occupations that aren’t tied to a particular place and time. It’s something that you can do anywhere, any time, if you want to. So I used to find it odd to hear so many writers talk about their desks and offices (and I thought it was especially odd that [...]

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Tag, You’re It

April 20, 2011 – 6:12 am

Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I’ll take what I can get.) She was listing [...]

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More than repetition

April 3, 2011 – 6:09 am

“There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition… “But not much!”  – The Flying Karamozov Brothers   There are some basic things about writing that people who’ve done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one [...]

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Tools of the Trade, part 2

March 13, 2011 – 9:26 am

So I’m still poking through all the programs for writers. Storybook turned out to be another one that was more of a planner than a writing program, which shouldn’t have surprised me, since it bills itself as a writing organizer. If I wanted a separate one of these, I think I’d really like it. I [...]

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Tools of the trade

March 9, 2011 – 6:10 am

I have a confession to make: I love playing with writing programs. They’re a window into other writers’ working processes, something I find utterly fascinating and always have. Lately, I’ve had another reason for poking through what’s available: the latest and last version update to my favorite word-processor was over ten years ago, and I doubt [...]

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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 Opening

December 12, 2010 – 6:27 am

It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a “hook” – something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what “hooks” one reader will annoy or repel another, and this is seldom acknowledged by [...]

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Exercising, Part 2

December 8, 2010 – 9:03 am

Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I’m now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they’re useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren’t as developed as the rest of the writer’s tool set. [...]

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Exercising, part 1

December 5, 2010 – 5:19 pm

Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see how to guide stuff through the feed. I [...]

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A Few Basic Definitions

November 10, 2010 – 6:07 am

When I was writing my first novel, I didn’t know any other writers (well, except for my mother). I’d also never read a how-to-write book. Consequently, there were a lot of things that I did without knowing there was a name for them; as far as I was concerned, they were just things I’d seen [...]

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The Uses of a Skeleton

November 7, 2010 – 2:10 pm

Ms. Wrede, do you use a plot skeleton? asked the earnest student. How do you apply it to your work? I sat there for a minute, completely slumguzzled. Because the question was coming from such an alien perspective that it took me a while to come up with an answer that seemed even remotely sensible [...]

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NaNoWriMo

October 27, 2010 – 6:20 am

November approaches, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month, a “writing event” that involves people all over the world trying to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November. Along with NaNoWriMo comes, inevitably, a flock of earnest would-be writers asking whether or not they should participate (and, occasionally, whether [...]

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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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Say That Again, Would You?

August 29, 2010 – 10:12 am

Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems [...]

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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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Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

July 18, 2010 – 6:27 am

Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum – maybe just hair and eye color – and [...]

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Cliches and some things to do with them

July 12, 2010 – 11:08 am

Sooner or later, most writers go through a period of worrying that their work is full of clichés. Some folks take this to ridiculous extremes; one person I ran into was worried about their heroine’s hair color, because it just seemed clichéd to have her be blonde, brunette, or redhead, but the writer couldn’t think [...]

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Reading like a writer

June 9, 2010 – 8:07 am

Most people just read books. That is, they absorb the information, or enjoy the plot and characters, without thinking too much about how and why they work. It’s a lot like watching a play, or a magic show. It’s supposed to be relaxing, so sit back and enjoy. Reading like a writer is more like [...]

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Dialog

May 5, 2010 – 10:54 am

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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On writing exercises

August 10, 2009 – 8:54 pm

Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to guide stuff through the feeds.  I waited until [...]

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