Any tool can be used goodly or badly! Why are adverbs “bad?” Well, to be fair, they’re not. They’re quite simple and clear in their meaning, and are very common in ordinary speech. However, some are severely overused in prose, making it plodding and tiresome to read. Some are extremely extraneous. And some tell what you can easily be showing instead. One good way to step up your writing is to strike and swap out adverbs- when it makes sense…
I’ve read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time at least a dozen times since I was eight years old. One passage in particular has always stuck with me: Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness, the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure….
We hear it all the time: show, don’t tell. And most of the time, that’s solid advice. But there are occasions where a tell is necessary, or just a better idea: for the sake of brevity, backstory, worldbuilding, your series theme song, that sort of thing. The way to do tells is to weave them in as seamlessly and naturally as possible. They should be ninja, dropping information into your readers’ minds without anyone being the wiser. Why? Because an…
Arguably, the most important thing to get right about writing is actually sitting down and doing it. I’ve commented before on where to find time, and how to build up the discipline to use that time well when it arrives. Know what’s just as important, but isn’t mentioned nearly as often? You need a damn break once in a while. You need to get away and think about anything but writing. Let ideas meld and play around in your subconscious,…
Worldbuilding is the process of developing a setting for your story, mostly by gradually revealing that setting to the reader. Even if your story takes place in present-day Earth, there may be things about the setting that will be unfamiliar to the majority of your audience. Maybe you’re writing about a foreign country or culture, for instance. Outside of present-day Earth, things get more complex. With historical fiction, for instance: you’ll want to do your research, then figure out how…
So, one day you’re going along your business when BOOM! It hits you: a great idea for a story! Awesome! Full of excitement, you launch right in, with tons of momentum behind you. Entire chapters fly from your fingertips! …then, about 50 pages down the line, it all peters out. The motivation goes away. Ideas dry up. You’d rather barf than return to that hideous thing. What were you thinking? Your work in progress gets deleted, or shoved aside for…
All right! Let’s assume you’re plotting your characters for a full-length novel. You’ve used the character sheet to form a baseline idea of where everyone comes from and what they’re capable of. You’ve plotted out character arcs to figure out how the story’s plot is going to affect each character, and how they’ll react in turn. As you might realize while arc-plotting, these characters don’t exist inside glass bubbles, totally separate from other characters. They (gasp!) interact with one another…
(Image credit: Imagebase.net) When you create a character, you start with a collection of attributes. Then a story happens- and if it’s a complicated story, it affects the character. Their attributes change, for better or worse. Actually, there are two types of character change you may track as a writer, depending on how much upfront planning you like to do. There’s the anticipated character arc you plot out before getting started, and then there are the unanticipated changes that come…
You may need a few… hundred of these… Anyone familiar with pen-and-paper roleplaying games (RPGs) has spent a few hours, and plowed through a few packs of cookies and soda, to set up character sheets. Character sheets define the starting state of a character, and allow a player to track how that state changes throughout the roleplaying campaign. Most character sheets are daunting to the first-time player, because there’s so much to track. What does the character look like? What…
What is tension, exactly? Tension is the heightening of stakes in some way. I like to think of it as a dangling carrot in front of the protagonist. You never want to give them the carrot right away. They should reach, and strain, and work- even suffer- for it. Meanwhile, the audience watches with bated breath, and ideally roots for the protagonist to triumph. Obstacles must stand between the protagonist and what they want. If there are no obstacles, it’s…