Metaphorical maps

One of the fairly common writing metaphors draws a connection between writing a novel and taking a road trip. You see a lot of comments like “You don’t need to see the entire highway that leads from Chicago to Denver in order to drive to Denver; you

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Viewpoint switching, part 2

So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s

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Mid-scene viewpoint switching

This week I got an email question about switching point of view within a scene. It’s one of the hardy perennial questions, but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it directly in this blog. First, an example: Jennifer paced the room, wondering where George was. It’s three

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Scrivener and process

Scrivener is currently one of the best-known pieces of writing software out there. People who use it tend to love it and go all evangelical about it (as a number of commenters noted two posts ago). It occurred to me while reading all those comments that talking

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Stress

Stress affects everybody’s writing, one way or another, sooner or later, because stress is part of life. How stress affects people’s writing varies from writer to writers. For some folks, writing is an escape, so the more stressed they are, the more they write (though this isn’t

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The Right Tools

Writers have promoted their favorite writing tools – each of which is different – for as long as I’ve been in the business, and probably all the way back to when the writers working on clay tablets sneered at that new-fangled papyrus stuff imported from Egypt. To

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Edges

Ever since the invention of the assembly line, one of the fundamental assumptions of our culture has been that the most effective way of getting something done is to break the job down into small pieces or steps that get you from where you are to where

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Worst and Best Advice

“What are the three worst or best bits of writing advice you’ve ever been given?” Somebody asked me that a while back, and it took me a while to come up with a reasonable answer, because at least one of them was perfectly horrible advice for me…but

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Recruiting Extras

I keep running into the problem of “the main characters seem to be the only people in the setting.” Might I beg a post on how to do crowd scenes (or scenes in general) where there are lots of people in the background? –Question from Deep Lurker

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