Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 50
July 9, 2017
Characters at the Edge
Are your story’s characters living out at the edge? If not, maybe you should push them further out there.
What does that mean? In this post by author Steven Pressfield, he mentions a friend of his who considers fictional characters far more interesting, more worth reading about, if they operate at some extreme, if they’re desperate enough to act outside normal boundaries.
Image from pixabay.com
Only then is the drama enticing enough, the character fascinating enough, to make the tale worth th...
July 2, 2017
Best-Seller Foreteller?
What if a soothsayer could tell you if your manuscript would become a best-seller? If you were a publisher, you’d hire that soothsayer, right?
Throughout the history of the publishing industry, editors and publishers had to make buy-or-reject decisions based on experience and gut feel.
Welcome to the Age of Big Data.
Crystal ball image from Wikipedia
According to an article in The Telegraph , researchers at Stony Brook University used computers to analyze writing styles and could predict whet...
June 25, 2017
Instability
What’s that trumpet fanfare I’m hearing? Oh, that’s right. My story “Instability” will appear in the anthology Dark Luminous Wings. It’s another Pole to Pole Publishing anthology, edited by the incomparable Kelly A. Harmon and Vonnie Winslow Crist.
Kelly and Vonnie wanted stories involving wings, so I did some research and brainstorming. As usual, I generated plenty of ideas and had to down-select to one that would result in a compelling story of the right length.
From Wikipedia.org
In my res...
June 18, 2017
An Analysis of Effortless Story Writing
“That story wrote itself,” I’ve sometimes said. But I exaggerated; it didn’t really happen that way. Still, it got me thinking. What if a story could write itself?
I decided to find out. Being rather sciency, I reckoned I’d conduct a careful and thorough experiment. I would give a story every conceivable chance, every possible opportunity, to write itself. Not because I’m lazy, you understand. This was for Science.
It’s time to shift the tone of this blog post to scientificalic language, lest...
June 11, 2017
Giftwrapping an Idea
Most gifts are tangible things, items that occupy space and have weight. But writers tread the realm of visions and dreams, thoughts and imaginings. You can’t give those things as gifts, can you? Well…
Author Andrew Gudgel and I were exchanging gifts at holiday time a few years ago. He’d been talking (for well over a year) about a story idea he had. I thought it was wonderful and kept urging him to write the story. Instead, as a gift to me, he said, “You write it.”
There were some tangible th...
June 4, 2017
Near Misses in Technology
For six years I’ve used this blog to aid beginning writers, but starting today I’ll occasionally take on other topics. Technology is fascinating to me, and today’s topic is those near misses in history when someone developed a technology before the world was ready.
What do I mean by ‘near misses?’ I’m talking about when an inventor came up with a new idea but it didn’t catch on, either because no one saw the possible applications or because there was no current need.
When you compare the date...
May 29, 2017
What’s the Price for That Nice Plot Device?
You’ve heard of plot devices, but do you know what they are? Are they good or bad? Can you name any? For answers to these questions, you’ve come to the right blog post.
No, wrong kind of ‘device.’
From www.snappygoat.com.
Before we can define the term ‘plot device,’ let’s review what a plot is, and how a writer develops one. A plot is a sequence of events in a story, events connected by cause and effect. The writer aims to construct this sequence such that it accomplishes at least the followi...
May 21, 2017
Do Yer Worst, Ye Scurvy, Book-Piratin’ Dogs!
You’re an inexperienced writer; you finally get a book accepted and published. Now some pirate website is giving your book away free, and paying you nothing. What do you do about it?
A modern book pirate’s treasure chest
Before I answer that, what exactly is a book pirate, and how do their sites work? A book pirate takes your ebook (or scans your print book and converts it to .pdf) and gives it away to anyone who wants to download it. They don’t pay you or your publisher. This is illegal.
Giv...
May 7, 2017
Are Your Stories Antifragile?
That’s no typo in this post’s title. Antifragility is a thing, and today I’m discussing the concept as it applies to fictional stories.
In his book Antifragile, Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks if there is an antonym of the word “fragile.” If there were such an adjective, he’d say it describes things that become stronger when stressed.
He doesn’t mean words like ‘robust,’ ‘tough,’ or ‘resilient.’ Those words describe things that sustain shocks without damage. He want...
April 29, 2017
Steps Toward Becoming a Writer
Are there discrete steps or stages between non-writer and writer? Do all writers tread the same path?
I got thinking about that after reading Ani Chibukhchyan’s guest post on thewritepractice.com. She claimed to have passed through seven stages in becoming a writer, and guessed all writers climbed the same set of stairs.
Her stages were: Keeping your writing to yourself, Wanting to share your writing, Hiding behind a pen name, Waiting for permission, Coming out, Insecure introductions, and I...
