Scene choreography or planning is a thing that some writers do up front, some do as a routine part of their process, and some hardly ever bother with even though they’re not pantsers, strictly speaking. What I’m talking about here is a whole class of preparation variously
Read more →The second aspect of dialog, after “what people are talking about,” is how they talk about it. This is where the technical aspects of dialog begin to come into play: word choice, phrasing, idiom, syntax, and punctuation. That’s enough that it’s going to take me more than
Read more →I recently read a dual-viewpoint story that I nearly put down right in the middle, even though I’d been thoroughly enjoying it up until that point, because of the way the author handled the viewpoints. Specifically, the question of which viewpoint to use to tell the reader
Read more →Some while back, I had a conversation with a reader. It went on for quite a while, but I can sum it up pretty quickly: Him: “That book is terrible. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It has a prophecy in it. Stories with prophecies in them are
Read more →OK, first the news: Sorcery and Cecelia is the Sizzling Book Club pick this month and Caroline and I will be joining their Live Chat on Wednesday, December 19 (that’s Wednesday, one week from today). The live chat starts at 9 pm EST and runs for an hour
Read more →Foreshadowing is the subtle art of suggesting or hinting at developments in plot, characterization, or setting that will happen later in the story. It’s a promise to the reader that the gun on the mantelpiece will go off eventually, that the main character will be forced to
Read more →Let me start by pointing out that I’ve never written a screenplay myself. I’ve read some, and I’ve worked with some doing novelizations, but that’s a bit different from writing them myself. I feel the need to point this out because I keep running into folks who
Read more →
