Excerpt from incomplete story.
Category: Writing
In Depth Fictional Cultures
Whether the colorful backdrop or under the microscope, culture can create fantastic engagement for the audience. Detail the many dishes in a feast and watch me start in the kitchen to form and indulge in those same treats. For the audience a habitable environment is made of interlocking components which can, in appearance, exist on … Continue reading In Depth Fictional Cultures
Historical Events as Setting
How to adapt real word events as a setting for your story.
Literary Shorthands
It’s inescapable that we want to charge through the banal parts of a story and get to the good stuff. It’s your job to break out the red pen and condense the bits which drag. But what do you lose when you make it short and sweet? Right now I’m reading some grimdark shlock to … Continue reading Literary Shorthands
Scale and How Big a Threat is it?
If failure’s not an option then why should I try here?
Rations and Steel: War and Combat in Fiction
Writers Write on their Stomachs
Rise and Shine
The sun struck Ashley’s eyes despite the pok-a-dot blanket she pulled over her head. She’d become accustom to it since sleeping in her twin bed pressed against the west wall of her bedroom. Her reason to get up early as an alarm clock for all those yet to wake, the light crawled along the small … Continue reading Rise and Shine
Discontinuity and Narrative Errors
Your story should be an understandable sequence of events which taken consecutively will lead into one another with factual consistency. This lets your audience digest the information in a familiar manner which makes logical sense. Without this sinew the audience can’t discern what just happened or if what just happened actually happened or matters. Then … Continue reading Discontinuity and Narrative Errors
What to Keep When You Cut
It’s extremely difficult to ascertain this information from reading a book because it’ll be blended into the finished story. It’s also a crushing blow to the junior writer when they fall into this invisible pitfall only realized long after the cuts are made. Then they have to scour distant memories for the little bits they … Continue reading What to Keep When You Cut
Freytag’s Pyramid vs Story Arcs
Choose your character! That’s part of it yes but including either of these structures into your story can be a useful tool for organizing plots. Order and familiarity help ground the audience’s expectations while giving the writer the means to subvert, confirm, or reject those expectations. You can’t pull the rug out from someone if … Continue reading Freytag’s Pyramid vs Story Arcs
Colin Klawans 