Elements of Fiction
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A Few Thoughts on Setting
Setting is a crucial element of fiction, and as a writer, you should be intimately familiar with your setting. Your reader doesn’t have to be, though. Give them enough to give them a flavor of where they are, but not so much that you bore them. If you love writing long descriptions and gentle soliloquies about a flower or the view of a mountain from a stream, have at it. Just be prepared to edit most of it out. Kill your darlings, Darling. We live in a cinematic society. Everybody has seen a mountain, and a stream, and a mountain from a stream, and everything else. We’ve even seen outer…
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Three Ways to Increase Tension in Your Story
Tension is the thing that keeps your reader reading. Conflict can help build tension, but there are other ways to do so as well. Here are just a few. Raise the Stakes to Increase Tension Ugh! I remember hearing this phrase as a beginning writer and being befuddled. What are stakes? How do you raise them? Easy peasy. Just think of it like this. Stakes are what your character has to lose. That’s all. Your main character should always have a type of death at stake. I can be physical death, psychological, professional, etc. They need to be risking more than a hangnail. In order to get to this level,…
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How Conflict is the Core of Your Story
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The Dos and Don’ts of Dialogue
Learning dialogue is an art all its own, and it’s one that you must master (or at least achieve competence in) if you want to be an effective writer. Let this list be your guide to achieving dialogue that brings life to your story rather than leaving it bloated and ready to crawl off and die. Yes, the quality of your dialogue can make or break your story. The principal use of dialogue is to bring conflict to a scene and to show character. Please keep this in mind while you are crafting your dialogue (or rewriting it). First, what you shouldn’t be doing. Do Not Have Speeches in Dialogue…
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How Conflict is the Core of Your Story
Conflict. I know that I’ve been beating a drum on conflict (here, and here), and I’m here to do it again. It’s important. Alright? Conflict is the je ne sais quoi that keeps your reader turning the pages. You need to build conflict into every scene. What’s more, that conflict needs to move the plot forward. You can’t just have Johnny and Aunt Janice arguing about what salt and pepper shakers to use (unless you’re writing a cozy mystery about who is stealing pepper shakers). The conflict should build character, reveal backstory (just a little), or add to the plot that you’re building. Arguments are just the tip of the…
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Three Ways to Increase Tension in Your Story
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The Lazy Way to Outline a Story, Part Two
Okay, folks, we’re picking up right where we left off in part one. We’re going to take those plot points that we made in our basic outline and form them into individual scenes. We’ll start at the beginning. Remember that the three-act structure suggests that the intro and inciting incident together should be about 5-15% of your story, and the full beginning should be around 20-25% until you get through the first plot point. You may need to fiddle with this a little, but let’s see what we have to start with. 1) Jessica has just finished working on a client at a luxury salon. She spins the chair, and…
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The Lazy Way to Outline a Story
Hello Writers! I’m going to share with you how I outline a plot. This quick and easy way should satisfy all but the most ardent plotters and the most defiant of pansters. There are, of course, as many ways of outlining a story as there are writers, and if you’re new to either outlining or structure, then I’m sure that you will make this method your own in time. Brainstorm Before You Outline The first thing I do is to brainstorm. I get a nice blank sheet of paper and fill it with my story idea, brief character sketches, germinal scene ideas, setting notes, etc. Anything that I’ve thought of…
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What the Heck is a Character Arc?
One of the fundamental things that you should understand to help you write a great story is the character arc. The term character arc embodies all of the internal changes that the character goes through as a result of the story’s actions. Many novice writers and even published genre novelists leave this out, but I believe that it is crucial and helps to take your story to the next level. Do I Really Need a Character Arc? Although it is quite possible to write a story without a character arc, I would advise against it. The character arc is one of those things that satisfy the reader on a deeper…
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A Plot is a Plot is a Plot
Fail to plot, plot to fail. If structure is the thing that gives substance to your story, then plot is structure’s show-off fraternal twin. The two are tied together (conjoined twins, maybe?). Plot consists of all of the happenings in your story; the things that take your inciting incident all the way to your resolution. The defining factor of what is plot and what is filler is cause and effect. Plot is Propelled by Cause and Effect Each scene should have a cause, and each scene should have an effect. This is what propels your story forward. If you have a scene that has no story cause and has no…
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Scenes, Scenes, Wonderful Scenes!
The scene is the building block of fiction. Once upon a time, a novel might contain a lengthy description of a field, several flashbacks, and lots and lots of telling. Those days are gone. We’ve become a cinematic society. Scenes speak to us. Pretty words are all well and good, and I do enjoy them myself, but not when they put the story on hold. Not when they bore me. Scenes move the story forward, keep your reader turning the pages, keep them on the edge of their…well, you get it. As Ansen Dibell puts it in her wonderful craft book, Plot: “Creating scenes means finding ways for your story…
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A Gentle Introduction to Story Structure
Structure is foundational to telling a good story. Although the two elements do go hand in hand, plot is not the same as structure. You can think of it like the layers of a quilt. You’ve got the colorful outside fabrics and the patterns that make people say ‘that’s a beautiful quilt. ’ That would be the plot. Then, you have the fluffy white batting that fills the quilt. This is stuff that nobody sees in the final quilt and that only fellow-quiltmakers probably ever think about, but if you didn’t have that batting, your quilt would not be functional. It would only be two floppy pieces of fabric attached…
