An idiot plot was first defined by James Blish as “a plot that only hangs together because all of the main characters act like idiots.” I’d add “…when they’re not supposed to be idiots,” because there are plenty of stories about characters who are supposed to be
Read more →Who’s telling the story? Unless a story is in first-person, most people will answer “the writer;” if the story is first-person, some of them will say “the viewpoint character.” And they’re not exactly wrong … but they’re not exactly right, either. In both cases, the writer is
Read more →Enough with the transitions – another Open Mic week has arrived! Talk amongst yourselves while I try to reduce the level of clutter in the office…
Read more →Narrative transitions are the second major way of getting characters from Scene A to Scene B. Instead of simply skipping a bunch of time or a change in location, a narrative transition briefly summarizes, describes, or explains whatever the author is skimming over lightly. Because narrative transitions
Read more →In looking back over this blog after the last post, I realize that I haven’t ever explicitly dealt with scene-to-scene or chapter-end-to-chapter-beginning transitions – not all in one post, anyway. So here is that discussion. The first thing to look at is what changes between the end
Read more →Last week, Deep Lurker asked whether I still hate writing transitions. The answer is a qualified yes – qualified, because the question made me realize that this is one more place where writing terminology covers at least two kinds of thing, and they’re very different. Transition is
Read more →Most of my regular readers seem to have realized that the only “writing rules” I believe in are the ones that involve grammar, spelling, and punctuation – and that even those are flexible, if the writer needs to play with them to get a particular effect in
Read more →If you’ve read the last couple of blog posts about my current WIP, you may have noticed that the end of the story started off as “Kayla confronts the Archmage. Kayla wins. Everybody celebrates.” This is actually more specific than the end of my first-stage outline normally
Read more →This is the slightly belated Open Mic Day that would have happened last week if I hadn’t had a software malfunction that messed up the notification. I think that is sorted out now, so the next one will be six weeks after this. So, talk amongst yourselves
Read more →Last week, I talked about getting my plot outline up to a sketchy 1200 words. Usually, my plot outlines start off fairly specific (“Kayla is in the library with Harkawn, reviewing past Dark Lord grimoires. She is annoyed – what good is summoning a horde of mosquitoes?
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