Well, it’s another day of another heat wave. Color me bleak. And sweaty. One of the many reasons I moved to the magical Pacific Northwest was to escape the miserable, humid summers of the Midwest. When the going gets over 90 degrees farenheit, I turn to fiction and films, and, as previously mentioned, TV shows […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'fiction techniques' Category
Building Storyland, 2
Place matters. With your opening words the setting signals readers that they’ve now entered storyland. Signals readers that a story— part wonder, part participation located in an ordinary or treasured or troubled realm⎼⎼is unfolding. It means readers will have a place to land and settle in. And setting helps categorize fiction–urbanfantasy, westerns, Lovecraftian, dark fantasy, high […]
Read the rest of this entry »Nail it
If I show you my character has great hair, you will not see her. If I tell you she has a tiny scar at the upper left corner of her lip from which protrudes one gray whisker–you will make up the rest of her face with absolute clarity. If I tell you my character is […]
Read the rest of this entry »Quick Take:
Stories are about change. The more painful the better. These difficult changes are going to happen to your protagonist–he or she will always be the character most hurt and changed by the story events. The effect of all these changes? A character arc. Proof that your protagonist has come through the fire, has been somehow […]
Read the rest of this entry »Details to heighten conflict
Our daily lives are filled with insipid details, background sounds, and habitual responses. There is both sameness and comfort in the dailiness of our routines, the furnishings and clutter in our homes, the alarm clock buzzing each weekday morning. And our storytelling needs bits of this day-to-day normality to establish an authentic and breathing world. Within […]
Read the rest of this entry »Villains: Color them Dark and Dastardly, part 1
A liver-eating, Chianti-drinking cannibal.Let the games begin!
Read the rest of this entry »Fiction is about the most interesting events in your protagonist’s life
If your story is not the most dramatic, intense, and difficult circumstances in your protagonist’s life, why then are you writing it?
Read the rest of this entry »Quick Take: Plan for Turbulence
Beginning fiction writers I’ll make this quick: In fiction characters do not get along most of the time. Tension comes from fractious relationships, power struggles, disagreements, love or hate or longing that cannot be expressed. Plan your stories for turbulence, not sweetness. Fiction is a world of unease. I told you I’d be quick.
Read the rest of this entry »Brian Doyle on Voice & Truth
“I was learning a lot of times what people said was not at all what they meant….It was hard to learn all the languages spoken in our house. There was the loose limber American language that we all spoke, and then there was the riverine sinuous Irish language that the old people spoke when they […]
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