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 →Reading involves a certain amount of mental inertia, simply because we are all humans and that’s part of how the basic brain setup works. By “mental inertia” I mean the underlying assumption that how things are, or how they have been for a while, is how things
Read more →Description in stories is fractal. No matter what the writer chooses to describe, there’s another level available if they want it. Describe a room: walls, floor, ceiling, furnishings. Describe the walls – stone or plaster, painted or natural, square or circular or irregular, empty or covered with
Read more →Carrying on a bit further from last week: Describing your point-of-view character can be tricky. If you’re in omniscient viewpoint, you may not need to; even when the omniscient narrator has an unusual voice and decided opinions, he/she isn’t a character in the story whose physical description
Read more →Got back to the daily frenzy yesterday. Going from vacation straight to house guests is enough to give you whiplash, even (or especially?) when the house guests are family… But part of the daily frenzy is the weekly blog post, so here I am. A couple of
Read more →Over the last couple of decades, I’ve noticed that more and more of the newer writers are over-describing things. It looks to me as if they are attempting to create a clear and specific image in words, the way a camera does with, well, a photo. At
Read more →
