A few years back, I was discussing the importance of viewpoint choice with a young writer. We appeared to be in complete agreement on the subject, right up to the point where he commented that changing the viewpoint of “Snow White” to one of the dwarfs made
Read more →Characterization comes in two parts—physical and personality, or, if you prefer, external and internal. This complicates all the basic telling/showing decisions, which are complicated even more by what the story’s viewpoint is. Let’s start with the physical/external, because it’s a lot like the description of places I
Read more →Today I want to talk about the “show” part of “show, don’t tell.” Because it isn’t quite as simple as it looks. (And that is why it took me the whole post to just talk about showing in terms of describing a setting, meaning I’m going to
Read more →Probably the most common piece of technical advice about writing fiction is “show, don’t tell.” I’ve gone on at length in other posts about what’s wrong with this dictum, but today I want to talk about how to do it right. Starting with some technical aspects. First,
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