Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 80
May 20, 2012
All Your Stage’s a World
Yes, I know Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” but my point today has to do with the settings of stories. The “stage” or “world” or “milieu” of your story is its setting.
The setting includes such things as the physical location, the time in history (including time of year and day), geography, culture, etc. It includes all aspects of the description of this backdrop for the characters–the effect on all senses, as well as the overall mood. Setting is, along with Character, Style, and...
May 15, 2012
Book Review – A Time of Changes
I’ve enjoyed other books by Robert Silverberg (Roma Eterna, Letters from Atlantis, and Gilgamesh the King) and so had high hopes for A Time of Changes, published in 1971. After all, it won the Nebula Award in 1972 for best science fiction novel. I listened to the Recorded Books version, their Sci-Fi imprint, read by Pete Bradbury.
The blurb for the book stated it takes place on another planet where the use of “I” and “me” or any self-referring pronouns is blasphemy. For me, that brought to min...
May 13, 2012
We’d Like to Offer You a Contract…
You’ve sent your short story around to different markets, gotten rejections, but finally one publisher accepts your story. Hooray! Then an e-mail arrives with a long, legal document for you to sign. It’s your first writing contract. It looks so complicated, and all you want to do is see your story published, so you think about signing that contract without really reading it.
Don’t do that.
At its most basic level, a contract is a written agreement between two willing parties. Each has somethin...
May 9, 2012
Book Review – Unbroken
Every once in a while, I’m reminded how little I have to complain about. Go ahead, do as I did and read Unbroken, a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand and see if you can whine about something going wrong in your life.
I listened to the Random House Audio version © 2010, read by Edward Herrmann.
This book is a biography focusing on the life of Louis Zamperini. The man is so fascinating that his life would not require a skilled biographer to result in...
May 6, 2012
Of Adverbs, Approvingly
Was ever a part of speech more maligned than adverbs? Go ahead–search the Web for a kind treatment of them. More often you’ll find admonitions to hunt them down and kill them where they stand. Is that nice? What have adverbs ever done to you?
Adverbs are those words most often ending in ‘ly,’ that modify verbs and adjectives. They often answer a ‘how?’ or ‘to what extent?’ question with respect to their attached verb or adjective. How did he run? Rapidly. How did she speak? Quietly. To what ex...
April 30, 2012
Book Review – Counting Heads
As both of my many readers know by now, I listen to books on tape more often than I read them these days. The latest was Counting Heads by David Marusek. I listened to the Recorded Books version narrated by Kevin R. Free. I enjoy good science fiction, and the blurb about the book sounded impressive. Mr. Marusek has apparently written short stories and I believe this is his first novel, but I have not read anything else by this author.
In a future North America where people can live hundreds of...
Writing the Kübler-Ross Way
When writing fiction, you want your characters to seem authentic to readers, to react in believable ways to the events that happen to them. Such reactions need not match how the reader would react in the same circumstances, necessarily, but they should be in accordance with the character’s personality, not clash with it. To achieve that authenticity, you need to be a detailed observer of human nature. In addition to that, you can discover what psychiatrists have determined.
Psychiatrist Dr. El...
April 15, 2012
Use Mind Maps to Solve Your Writing Problems
The concept of mind mapping has come up in my blog entries before, as a suggested tool to help writers. I’ve said you can use mind maps for outlining, to improve your creativity, and to solve pesky plotting problems. But what exactly is a mind map, and how does it work?
A mind map is a way of organizing and illustrating thoughts about a topic. I learned about the technique from reading Use Both Sides of Your Brain, by Tony Buzan. It contrasts quite a bit from other note-taking methods like the...
April 8, 2012
What He Said About ‘Said’
“Today’s blog post is about the word ‘said,’” said Poseidon’s Scribe.
“What is there to say about ‘said?’” asked Blog Reader, who hoped to write fiction someday.
“First, ‘said’ is the most common type of ‘dialogue tag’ used in fiction to indicate who’s speaking,” said the Scribe. “However, many budding authors worry about overusing that word, so they substitute other words.”
“I don’t believe that,” asserted the Reader.
“It’s true, but the fact is, ‘said’ is pretty much invisible. You can’t overus...
What He Said About 'Said'
"Today's blog post is about the word 'said,'" said Poseidon's Scribe.
"What is there to say about 'said?'" asked Blog Reader, who hoped to write fiction someday.
"First, 'said' is the most common type of 'dialogue tag' used in fiction to indicate who's speaking," said the Scribe. "However, many budding authors worry about overusing that word, so they substitute other words."
"I don't believe that," asserted the Reader.
"It's true, but the fact is, 'said' is pretty much invisible. You can't
