Nearly every writer has what I call a “default setting” for many or most of the basic pieces of writing. They tend to automatically write in first person, or third, or multiple viewpoint. When they’re thinking up stories or developing ideas, they gravitate toward the action/adventure plot,
Read more →Most people just read books. That is, they absorb the information, or enjoy the plot and characters, without thinking too much about how and why they work. It’s a lot like watching a play, or a magic show. It’s supposed to be relaxing, so sit back and
Read more →A bit ago, I got asked to do my standard rant on this. I put it off ’til the book was done, but it’s done now. So here’s the short form: Read a story. Does it work? Yes? Then it’s good. The problem with the term “good
Read more →Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is
Read more →So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes. One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene
Read more →I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning. What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything
Read more →So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level. Action can
Read more →Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they’re pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I’ve said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that’s full of how-to-write books –
Read more →Writing is difficult to talk about. I mean the real thing, the stuff that happens when you are sitting there with your paper and pen or your computer or your stone tablets and chisel and telling a story. We talk about bits and pieces of writing all
Read more →As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do: the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind. The first
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