Deep Lurker’s request was second, for a post “on ways to depict events spread over several months.” If someone has been writing stories that take place over a couple of days or weeks, being faced with a story that takes place over a year or more can
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 →Transitions are a pain. It is very likely that I feel this way because I hate doing transitions, and the ones I write nearly always feel clunky to me. Some of the clunkiness is probably just my dislike of the process of producing one attaching itself to the
Read more →Thanks to some last-minute schedule changes and cancellations, I am now very confident that the first draft of Circuit Magician will be finished by late this week, even if I don’t quite make the June 1 deadline. Since I’ve already cleared that with my editor, this will
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