Past and Present 1: Telling your story out of order
What if you don’t want to start your story at the beginning? Join Kim Kessler and me for a discussion of stories with nonlinear timelines.
Writing
Inciting Incidents
Every scene requires change, and every change must be incited by something that flows from the previous scene. If your character is just coasting along on the momentum of a previous inciting incident, it’s not a new scene, it’s just a scene that needs some cutting.
Anne Learns to Write
For someone who’s been writing for five decades, it’s weird that I just learned how.
Objects of Desire
If you don’t know what your characters want and need, how are you going to move them through a story?
Podcasting with Shawn Coyne
Ten weeks writing a novella in public with Shawn Coyne as my editor…and a whole series of very strict constraints. What could go wrong?
Sometimes I can’t tell who I am anymore
Like most novelists, I just wanted to write. Not market myself.
Portland Book Festival
There are a LOT of book people in Portland. Writers, editors, small publishers, bookdealers, librarians…and readers. Readers galore. That’s why Portlanders pack the house to capacity every year for the Portland Book Festival (formerly, and better, known as Wordstock). This year, my friends Sue Campbell and Rachelle Ramirez and I got together, bought an exhibitor …
Worthwhile secondary characters
How well do you know your secondary and tertiary characters? A common early-draft issue is minor characters who act as mere props for the protagonist’s arc. Need a crisis for a main character? Subject a secondary character to an accident or illness. Need a contrast to your heroine? Pick a few top-of-mind traits (the nerd, …
Dialogue or narrative?
One of my editing clients posed this great question: Do you have any thoughts about when to write dialogue and when to just say “they talked about this or that” or “she told him about the project”? Why yes. Yes I do. Every time you use narrative as a substitute for dialogue, you’re telling. Dialogue …
What is subtext, anyway?
On the Editor Roundtable Podcast, where we analyze movies for story structure, the question of subtext comes up a lot. Subtext seems easier to detect in a movie than in writing because film gives us actors’ expressions, background visuals and sounds, camera techniques, music. In a novel all you’ve got is text. Words on the …