Janice Hardy's Blog, page 7

Tighten Your Novel with a Preposition Patrol

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A tighter novel helps keeps readers engaged in the story.

When I first started writing, my novels were long. Like, seriously long. This isn’t unusual for a new writer, and like countless ones before me, I set out to learn how to trim some of those excess words from my manuscript.

One of the things I discovered was the, “words you don’t always need” advice. On that list was “cut prepositions.”

I’d learned enough about writing at that point to know you shouldn’t heed advice without understanding the reasoning behind it, so I sat down and studied why prepositions and prepositional phrases were so awful.

What I found was—they aren’t.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

One the Road: Take Advantage of Your Reader’s Expectations

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I'm over at Writers in the Storm today with Take Advantage of Your Reader’s Expectations. Here's a sneak peek:

To strengthen your story, look at each scene as a reader would.

We writers spend a lot of time looking at our work like, well, a writer. We study plot and structure, pace and tension, character and dialogue, but how often do we think about how the reader is going to react to our story?

One of my critique groups is a “critique as we write” group. Every week, we turn in two chapters of our first drafts or whatever draft we’re revising. It’s a great way to keep our writing momentum going since we have people waiting for pages, but it’s had a much better benefit than we realized when we started the group. 

We get real-time feedback about what readers expect to happen next.

 This has utterly changed the direction of two of my novels so far, and both for the better.

 Read the full article here.

Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

Description Is More than Just “What it Looks Like”

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Choosing the right details to describe can be the difference between a scene that soars and one that falls flat.

I have a confession. I can’t stand description. I don’t like writing it, I don’t like reading it, it often just sits there on the page and does very little to enhance the story. Which for a science fiction and fantasy writer like me, is kinda a problem. I have entirely made-up worlds full of things that only exist in my imagination, and the only way I can bring those details to life for my readers is to, well, describe them.

It took me a long time, but I eventually learned that description wasn’t just a list of details and character features. And my stories got a lot better once I did.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

Are Your Characters Living in the Moment or Watching it Pass By?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 
Put yourself in a scene before you put your characters there.

Years ago, there was a bit of a scare in the Hardy household. Our oldest cat took a tumble and hurt his hind leg. He was fine (he just limped for a few days), but until I knew he was okay, I was a basket case. For the rest of the day, I was a nervous Momma, and that continued until my little guy was back to his old self.

In the grand scene of things, it was no big deal.

To me, it was a huge crisis. Someone I loved was hurt.

Even worse, someone vulnerable I loved was hurt and needed my help.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

Telling Yourself to Show: How to Identify Flat Scenes

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 
We don't always choose the right scenes to dramatize in a story.

I wrote a scene for my third novel, Darkfall, where my characters were sitting at a table talking about stuff. Now, from a technical standpoint, there wasn't anything wrong with this scene. My protagonist, Nya, had a goal for what she needed to do at that table, and there were stakes if she failed. 
This led to another scene where Nya was talking to someone else in a different room, gathering more information about things important to the story. It all advanced the plot.
But something felt off.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

Description Tip: Make “Sense” of Your Characters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

You have five great tools for writing better descriptions, so why not use them all?

I’ll be honest—description is my least favorite thing to write. I always have to do a revision pass specifically to add more description, and I have critique partners who regularly whack me with the description stick when I slack off.  So I created little games to make it more fun for me. One of them helps me focus and guides my brainstorming toward how my characters might see their world, and what ways they might describe their surroundings and experiences.

If you have a similar distaste of descriptions, or struggle with knowing what details to use, or you’re just looking for fun tips to help with description, try this:
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

Turning Good Writing into Great Writing

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The first words you write aren’t always the right words to use.

Tuesday, I spent at least a half hour writing one line—and it wasn’t an opening line. I was working on a new scene for my science fiction detective novel, and it’s an emotion-packed scene right after the Dark Moment that tacks onto the All Is Lost Moment. It’s one those “this is where the protagonist reveals secrets they’d been keeping from someone important in their life, and it goes badly” situations.

I reached the end of the scene and had my upset character storm off, and then dropped the last line of the chapter.

I knew the final line was the right way to end, but it just felt meh.

I also knew the action lines leading up to it were the right ones, but they also felt meh.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

The Faceless Villain: What to do When Your Protagonist Is the "Bad Guy"

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Not every story has a villain at its center—sometimes the problem is the protagonist.

For a lot of writers, the hardest-to-write conflict is the Person vs. Self conflict. Quite often, the antagonist is a physical being the protagonist can physically fight. But in a PvS conflict, there's no one plotting against the protagonist. The antagonist is something to overcome, such as depression, or grief, or a self-destructive streak that’s core to who the protagonist is and a flaw they need to fix by the end of the novel.

These stories are more challenging, but there’s no “Big Bad Guy” causing all the trouble.

But like any good conflict, even if your protagonist is dealing with a difficult personal issue, they'll still have an external antagonist to reckon with. Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

When Stuck in a Scene, Look Around

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Sometimes the answer to making a scene work is inside the scene itself.

I’ve been struggling with a major turning point chapter revision the past week, and one scene was really giving me a headache. It’s the end of Act Two, and the scene that triggers my protagonist’s Dark Night of the Soul and All Is Lost moments. So yeah, it’s important.

What’s worse, is that I knew how the chapter needed to end (because of those oh-so-critical moments), I just wasn’t sure how to get there based on where the story was after all the new revisions. I had to connect Point A with Point B, mixing the original mystery plot with the new personal subplot I’d added.

This scene depended on my protagonist getting face-to-face with the antagonist’s minion and realizing something world-shattering about himself and the Big Problem of the plot. And after all the revising I’d done, I had no idea why that minion was in the scene now.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com

3 Places Told Prose Likes to Hide

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Told prose can steal the oompf from your story and make readers want to skim.

As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I was guilty of a lot of telling in my early work. I’d infodump, I’d write pages of backstory, I’d explain how rules worked and which gods did what to whom. It was a total mess.

But as my writing improved, I discovered how helpful showing could be. It let me put all those wonderful details I’d created into the scene without having to explain them. It let me suggest the backstories and create layered, nuanced characters. It let me background the description and not write boring paragraph after paragraph on what something looked like.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com