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To Be or Not to Be
This is a more in-depth tutorial of what I covered in Seven Simple Ways to Make Your Writing Rock! One of the simplest (although not easy) ways of bringing more life into your writing is to go on a hunt for forms of ‘to be’. Those pesky little words, if you don’t remember from grammar school, are ‘am, is, are, was, were, being, and been.’ So go ahead, print your latest story or pull it up on your screen, and highlight every single one of those buggers. You should have a lot of them. Those are some of the most common words in the English language. That is the reason…
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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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The Glory of the Beta-Reader
First of all, what is a beta-reader? Only this – someone that you allow to read your work before you send it out into the world. You should make at least one pass looking for typos and blatant inconsistencies. You might want to get it to the point of what you think is the final draft. I suggest that with longer works, you only do minimal clean-up. Take care of plot holes you find yourself on your own first read, and then send it on. Why? You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time editing and making language flow and brainstorming perfect metaphors, just to find out that…
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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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Why Every Writer Should Be a Reader
If you want to be a writer, you must also be a reader. Notice that I didn’t say ‘should’. I said ‘must’. Yes, I know, the reason that most people come to writing is because they love to read, but sadly, that is not the case for all. I come across people now and then who do not read but, for some unknowable reason, want to write. I always imagine that these people have heard about the occasional (rare) occurrence of somebody writing a blockbuster novel and subsequently becoming richer than their wildest dreams. That fantasy is not going to work out for those people. First of all, you can…
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Do the Motivation with Me!
Character motivation is crucial to the believability of your fiction. Yes, it is fiction, but you can only expect the reader to suspend their disbelief for so long. You can stretch it a bit further in the speculative genres (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, magical realism, etc), but even in those stories, the rules of your story world should be established, and basic human motivation will still hold sway. If Johnny proposes to Sarah and it just comes out of the blue, it’s not going to be believable. Yes, they’ve been dating, but if you’ve been doing well building the conflict that is so important to your story, then there should be…
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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…
