Suggestion-box requests: (1) Dialog, in particular mixing stage business with dialog. It’s been a while since I’ve done a post on dialog, and I have a request for one, so here ‘tis. So-called “stage business” in fiction follows the theater definition; it’s “an incidental action, such as
Read more →Once a writer knows who’s fighting, where and when they’re fighting, why they’re fighting, and all of the resources each side has, they can get to choreographing the scene itself. How much choreographing needs to be done depends, again, on the size of the fight, and the
Read more →Action scenes are the bane of many writers. Fight scenes are often considered the quintessential action scenes, but a “fight scene” can mean anything from two guys slugging each other to an epic battle between massive armies or space armadas. There are several key points for making
Read more →The term “action,” like many terms in writing, covers a lot of ground. Some is obvious: a chase scene is action; so is a boxing match, a brawl, a battle, a gunfight. The scene where one guy is clinging to the railroad trestle and the other guy
Read more →A lot of my friends have trouble writing action scenes. Not on the sentence-by-sentence level – they know all the tricks and tips – but on a more general level. They know that their first-person viewpoint character is only going to have a close-up, confused picture of
Read more →Back when I was writing my first novel, I got somewhere in the middle and realized I needed to write a battle scene. Not just a bar brawl or a fight between six of the good guys and ten or twelve bad guys; an actual clash of
Read more →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
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