Category: description
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Friday’s Findings: My 50K Novel Week 2
As an alternate to NaNoWriMo, I’m doing a 50K word rough draft of a novel in 30 days. Here’s how the second week went: Day 8: My city has the best coffee shops. I’m sitting in one before I go to work and I’m going to outline some unfinished scenes. I swore I wouldn’t do…
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Friday’s Findings: Creating a scene palette
When creating a scene for the first time, I have a list. And I try to hit as many points on that list as possible: Point-of-view character Establish setting Have a purpose (introduce a character, move the story along, etc.) Create conflict Build suspense The list goes on … But before writing the rough draft…
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James Scott Bell on Writing: The Best Writing Advice I Know
I’ve been going back and looking at my blog entries from years ago, and I kept coming across advice from author James Scott Bell. I quote him a lot. Two books on writing craft I highly recommend are: Write Your Novel From The Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers and Everyone in Between The…
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Friday’s Findings: Character Viewpoint and Description
I am a technical editor for an airline, and recently my department moved from one building to a new one. I love my new office. Everything is new and clean. It’s located in an airplane hangar, so I can just step away from my desk and go see the airplanes up close as the mechanics…
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Warning: No Info Dumping, Part 2
In my last blog entry, I talked about the dos and don’ts of info-dumping. Now, I’d like to offer some case studies of info-dumping in action. While these may exaggerate info-dumps in action, they can still cause the writer to ask herself, ‘Have I done this?’ Info-dumps mostly pop up in these areas of description…
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Friday’s Findings: The Recipe for Interiority
There’s this new term I’ve come across in the fiction craft world: interiority. I had never heard of it until last year when I took Mary Kole’s online class called Crafting Dynamic Characters. Great class. As far as using it as a writing craft term, I don’t know who coined interiority, but Kole built her…
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Sit and Quiet Yourself
“Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being…
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Friday’s Findings: The Perfect Story?
This week, I came across some articles that go over the basics of fiction: story elements, types of characters and the three act story structure. I also came across Writer’s Digest’s 50 best websites for writers in 2023. Elements of Fiction: A Quick Guide to Writing the Perfect Story – Kotobee Blog A refresher on…
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Friday’s Findings
Prologues vs. Flashbacks Backstory is something I’ve been thinking about lately and this article answered a lot of questions. How to Read Like a Writer (to become a better writer) Five simple steps to reading a book and noticing techniques writers use to make readers want to finish the book. 5 Ways to Write Better…
