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.
Advice From Your Editor
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?
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 …
The limits of “Show Don’t Tell”
I wish the “Show don’t tell” rule would die a fiery death. It’s an arbitrary, misleading decree, widely abused in writing groups where it gives pedants a footing for unconstructive criticism that they don’t have to justify. It can push inexperienced writers into breaking the equally-misunderstood brevity rule, because sometimes showing takes a lot more …
Should you spend time writing character backgrounds?
A client in the early first-draft stage wonders whether he should spend time writing character backgrounds. It’s a good question. Personally, I have probably tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of words in character interviews, backgrounds, childhood stories, 360-degree “performance reviews,” horoscopes… so you’re not going to hear from me that you shouldn’t do it. I’d just caution …
Should you spend time writing character backgrounds? Read More »