“Every scene must cause or lead into the next scene.” I ran across this particular bit of writing advice recently; it was followed by a couple of tips such as “cut any scene that isn’t caused by the scene immediately before it.” Wow, that means Ian M.
Read more →“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham I love that quote. I think of it whenever I’m faced with a would-be writer or critic who is waving a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of
Read more →Head-hopping is a mildly pejorative term for a writing technique that is usually summed up as “switching viewpoints within a scene,” followed by the strong recommendation that one should never, ever do it. The reasons given for never, ever head-hopping range from the blanket assertion that it
Read more →I’ve seen quite a few new writers come near to wrecking their work by trying to follow well-intentioned advice about what must go in a story. Oddly enough, the two most common pieces of story-wrecking advice are diametrically opposed. The first is: “Your main character must change
Read more →In the past two months, at least five different people have said something to me along the lines of “My teacher said/some professional writer said/my crit group says/I have observed [insert writing technique] is the rule for [insert writing problem or situation]. So is that a rule?”
Read more →Last week I was looking at web sites and found yet another one that advocated “Never, EVER use any adjectives or adverbs!” It went so far as to advocate going through one’s work and deleting all of them. So I decided to test that technique to see
Read more →One of the current fundamental tenets for writing fiction is that in order to be a “good book,” the central character in the story has to change as a result of the events in it. If one attempts to question this “requirement,” one is informed that if
Read more →“Show, don’t tell” has been basic fiction writing advice since Homer. It could be rendered less colloquially as “Dramatize, don’t summarize,” but either way, it doesn’t say “Show everything, tell nothing.” This leaves many beginning authors with two unanswered questions: 1) How, exactly, is showing/dramatizing different from
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