Stories are full of endings. From the ending of a multi-book plot arc to the ending of a sentence, writers face the same sorts of questions over and over: Have I said everything I need to say? Will this flow better if it’s longer or shorter? Does
Read more →Reading involves a certain amount of mental inertia, simply because we are all humans and that’s part of how the basic brain setup works. By “mental inertia” I mean the underlying assumption that how things are, or how they have been for a while, is how things
Read more →Borrowing One of the shortcuts a writer can use for any of the Big Three story elements (plot, characters, setting/backstory) is to borrow them from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” covers a lot of ground; the caveat is that if one is going to borrow from anything that
Read more →I spent last weekend at a steampunk convention as one of their author guests (I was supposed to be there in 2020, but…). It was the first time I’ve gone to a con since 2019, and it was refreshing, in spite of my various travel glitches (I
Read more →As some of you may be aware, the last year has involved a lot of expensive home repairs for me, mostly involving having to replace major appliances (furnace, water heater, air conditioner, computer, sewer line) plus minor repairs to several others. During one of my meetings with
Read more →And it is time for another Open Mic! Chat amongst yourselves while I get life stuff done, like taxes and renewing my driver’s license…
Read more →The other day I ran across an article on writing scenes, and the very first tip in it was “stick to one viewpoint per scene.” Based on context, the writer meant “stick to one viewpoint character per scene,” because it is rare for a writer to switch
Read more →There’s a scene in the Great Muppet Caper in which Lady Holiday, while interviewing Miss Piggy for a receptionist job, tells her a lot of personal information about her family relationships and the valuable jewelry (the Baseball Diamond…) she is going to put on display. When Miss
Read more →Twenty-some years ago, I was observing a break-out session at a writer’s conference (there were four scheduled during the day, following the keynote speaker; those of us who’d been brought in to do the break-out sessions were asked to do three, and had the option to sit
Read more →Like setup and foreshadowing (see last week’s post), payoff and consequences aren’t quite the same thing. If you look up the definitions, the writing-relevant one for “payoff” is “a final outcome or conclusion,” while the one for “consequences” is “the result or effect of an action or
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