Today’s quote comes from Thomas McCormack’s excellent book: THE FICTION EDITOR, THE NOVEL, AND THE NOVELIST. “Character is most keenly revealed when it’s confronted with crisis, hard choices, urgent decisions. Thus, insofar as he’s interested in revealing character, the author’s job is to construct setting and circuitry that will call for decisions, for actions.” When you sit down to write today, ask yourself what your characters want and how far they will go to get what they want? Ask what they do about getting what they want–and also what effect their actions have on others? Finally, ask if the reader …
Tag: writing fiction
THE WORD ON WORD COUNT
If you’re about to query agents about your debut novel and the word count tops 150k, land here first: The Swivet. Agent Colleen Lindsay lays out the basics by category. Bottomline–less is more. The average word count for a novel? Between 80k and 100k, with YA running between 50k and 80k.
THE FORCE FIELD OF RELATIONSHIP
Writers talk a lot about viewpoint characters. The story is told from her viewpoint. Or his viewpoint. Or both their viewpoints. Sometimes we become so focused on maintaining a strict viewpoint, we forget that narrative is about relationships. Relationships. Interactions. Exchanges. Collisions. Between people. And between a person and her world. When you write your next scene imagine an energy field or aura surrounding each of your characters. As you write, put your attention in the space where these energy fields collide. Now imagine an energy field (or a thousand different fields) coming from the physical world–the birds singing …
SECRETS & LIES – Daily Writing
If you are writing fiction and you want to spark a two-character scene and/or a short story, endow one character with a secret and the other with a lie. Now let them interact without either one revealing the truth. Too lazy or virtuous to come up with something juicy? Visit the Post Secret website for inspiration. It’s one of my favorite “writerly” sites online.
TREBLE THE TROUBLE
Writing fiction? Then Les Edgerton’s nifty book, HOOKED, is a great choice for your holiday gift list. (If you’re like me, you play secret Santa and buy yourself a few pounds of libros for the holidays.) Edgerton covers well-traveled ground when it comes to the how-to of structure. But he does it by focusing intensely on the basics of story setup–the opening hooks and problems–that directly connect to deep story structure. Edgerton defines the Inciting Incident–a term often used in the language of screenplays–as something that “happens to the protagonist that creates his surface problem and introduces the first indications …
A NARRATIVE SENSE OF PLACE
“If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting’s composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background…where there is a conflict between background and foreground, between character and setting, there is already “narrative content,” or the makings of a story.” Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft As an exercise, Burroway suggests writing a scene in which two characters are in conflict over their surroundings. One wants to stay, the other wants to leave. If you choose to do the exercise, you might try it twice–first …
SCAFFOLD SCENES–Part One
Scenes are basic building blocks of narrative. A scene can be defined as a story episode rendered fully and dramatically in order to make the reader feel she is present and witnessing the action in real time. In effective scenes, things happen and the world shifts. Secrets are discovered. Adversaries are confronted. Revelations arise. Decisions are made. When you write–especially when you rewrite–you should know what each scene accomplishes in your story. Ask yourself what function it serves. Effective scenes do more than one thing at once, but a quick inventory will help you stay on track and in action …
ANXIETY AND IMPULSE
Today–a special day for me–I’m sharing a quote from Hackneys, Huskies, a Glimmer Train essay by author Roxana Robinson, the award-winning author of four novels and three short story collections. To read the essay in its entirety visit glimmertrain.com. “All of the fiction I write arises from the same sort of impulse: it’s a feeling of discomfort, a kind of unspecified anxiety, a need to uncover something that troubles and disturbs me. I write toward that feeling. I try to explain it to myself in order to disarm it, to rob it of its potency. I don’t know how this …
QUOTE OF THE DAY–DIGGING FOR DEMONS
I’ve taken today’s quote from Les Edgerton’s nifty book HOOKED: Write fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go. “The best sources for significant story problems reside within yourself in the form of your personal demons. The very best writers are those who are courageous enough to go deep inside themselves to face and expose the warts and hidden and forbidden feelings most of us want to hide from or deny, at least to others. Not everyone is able to face his demons and bring them out to the light of day, but if you …
THE RANT!!!
When was the last time you had a really truly terrible sucky day? One of those worst days, when everything went wrong and you felt defensive and angry and backed into a corner? Maybe you really were backed into a corner–by your best friend or by the driver who cut you off in the parking lot and then waved a single digit your way. Maybe the bad stuff lasted a few hours or a few minutes; either way, by the end you were ready to blow your stack and rant! I’ve had my share of bad streaks and the rants …