Action is vital in fiction. But the action must fit the story. If you are writing a gentle love story you will probably not include car chases and IEDs. However you might include a hero who obsesses over a “potential” or “lost” love to the point of stalking. “Really, I was just picking up my dry-cleaning and can I help it if you work next door?” Details are also a vital part of bringing a fictional world and its inhabitants to life–however a wise writer chooses dynamic details, meaning those details that reveal something about the inner and outer life …
Tag: character development
#NaNoWriMo2015 — Get to the Heart of Your Story (writing tip #1)
Get to the heart of your story-it lives inside your hero: know what she wants, what drives her, and why. Give her a goal that matters. Know her deepest wound. Show us her fight to reach her goal and make sure that the forces of opposition might destroy her. Give her a friend who can make her laugh and let us readers catch our breath. Know that her fight is always a fight to the ‘death’-she will face a dilemma between what she wants and what she needs. She can’t have both. She must surrender her old view and be …
WRITER TO WRITER: 12 Possibly Relevant Tips at Year’s End
Do not take your moods too seriously (exclusions to this rule include clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and the like; if any of these apply, seek expert help and do not skip your meds!) because the dark hole you inhabit today may well presto-change-o to a snowy peak tomorrow, and either way, you still have to face the blank page and write the next paragraph/page/chapter/repeat. Do know what makes your skin crawl, your stomach turn to mush, and your brain freeze because chances are at least some of your characters share your fears and, writers, this is useful knowledge. Do know …
Fiction, the Mind, and Ghosts
“So far we’ve looked at two places where you can put the character emotion you’ve stripped out of your dialogue mechanics–into the dialogue itself and into the language of your descriptions written from an intimate point of view. A third place is interior monologue. Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to touch.” From Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King In other words: The fiction writer …
Quote of the Day on Point of View
Today’s quote from Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass: “Point of view is more than just a set of eyes looking upon the world. Those eyes come with a mouth and a brain. Those must come into play, too, or your novel will have the chilliness of a movie camera. There may be times when objective point of view is useful, but by and large it is best to use the singular advantage that the novel has over other art forms: the ability to bring us deeply inside a character’s experience.”
Dreaming Awake
“Creative writers make believe. They train themselves sharply to observe the world around them, to notice the unnoticed. They reach back into their past lives for rich characters, vivid settings, and meaningful events. But at some point, the search for raw material veers toward another source–it turns inward to what isn’t, wasn’t, and could never be, yet somehow seems right, real, and true.” From: THE CREATIVE PROCESS by Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley
Advice on Writing a Bestseller–Beware Info-Dump
When I work with writers, often the hardest news I have to deliver about their manuscript is “Cut, cut, cut, cut the info-dump.” That’s the term some people in the biz use to describe the excessive use of backstory/exposition. You know it when you see it–paragraphs or pages of information delivered passively to the reader. Information served up on a paper plate. Information that dulls the reader out of the dynamic narrative now. When I say it’s difficult to tell writers they have to cut backstory that’s because they’ve usually spent hours, days, weeks getting those sections just right. They …
Writing Advice from Kurt Vonnegut: Be a Sadist
Kurt Vonnegut insisted that each writer be a sadist when it comes to your main characters. Make awful things happen to them so readers can see what they are made of. If you want to absorb 7 more tips from the great KV, enjoy this YouTube wisdom.
CHARACTERS’ ADVOCATE
I came across this quote from actor Holly Hunter: “I always feel that I am the advocate for my character. More than anyone else on the set, including the director. I’m there to protect my character, in any way.” As writers, we might consider it our job to find an inner advocate for every character on our pages, even–especially–the least sympathetic. Remember the fiction writers’ “P” word: parity.
Attachments,Yearning, and Chocolate Bunny
My five-year-old daughter took a camping trip with her dad this weekend. They returned home early–both with colds–in part because it never stopped raining. This morning, when we searched for Chocolate Bunny, Pearl’s most treasured stuffy was nowhere to be found. Pearl tearfully remembered that she and her five-year-old friend Hawk had taken Chocolate Bunny out to play just before departure from the campground. And, yes, she thought he might have been left behind. It was a heart-rending moment for all of us. Pearl began to weep, her grief deep and real. We went into action, calling a company in …