Back in high school, I took a semester of journalism. The teacher focused hard on the “5 W’s and an H”—Who, What, When, Where, Why and How—and also on the structure of a news story (most important stuff in the first paragraph, steady increase in interesting-but-less-important details
Read more →As I’ve said before, dialog isn’t a transcript of the way people talk. It’s a stripped-down model that takes out the majority of verbal pause-fillers that don’t add meaning most of the time, such as “um,” “er,” “you know,” “like,” “uh,” “well,” etc. The catch is that
Read more →I’ve been plot-noodling with a couple of primarily character-centered writers lately, and I’ve noticed that they both have a similar problem. Most of the time, they don’t even see the places where they are dropping plot-hints…and when they do see them, they don’t immediately recognize them. One
Read more →Edited to reformat for readability, per Deep Lurker’s suggestion. This is my version of how-I-develop-it-into-a-scene when I’m having particular trouble. In this case, I started with a conversation “sketch draft” with minimal movement. There are four characters present: Archie, the 15-year-old POV; Del, aged 10; and Harkawn
Read more →The general consensus seemed to be that people wanted my stream-of-consciousness scene-developing example, so you’ll get that next week. In the meantime, here’s the technical post on moving characters around, that got interrupted because I can’t remember my own schedule for Open Mic days… Suggestion box: Could
Read more →So in my enthusiasm for answering questions, I appear to have forgotten that last week was supposed to be an Open Mic week. Here it is, late… And apropos of questions, I was wondering if people would be interested in a post taking a real-life bit of
Read more →Suggestion box: Could we have a post on moving characters around in a scene?…I struggle with how much detail to include on movement and on background. I don’t remember who described a scene as having naked characters sitting on clouds, but that’s about where many of mine
Read more →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 →I am sorry to have to let everyone know that Dorothy Heydt, a good friend and one of our regular author-contributors in the comments, has passed away. I don’t have much in the way of details, but Seanan McGuire, who is a close friend of the family,
Read more →I got quite a few requests in the last Open Mic, and I’m going to start working through them, beginning with this: Note the problem is not character story lacking, but putting together a single coherent plot that doesn’t consist of a character’s entire life story. I
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