Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 80

Dialog

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it's also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It's really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk to another.

But dialog in fiction isn't a transcription of actual speech. It's not even an imitation of real speech. It's a model of the way real people talk to each other, a model that's b...

Lights, camera…part IV

So after rambling on for three posts, I'm finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes.  One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually "Use short sentences and sentence fragments," because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right?

People who think this have obviously never been to one of those martial arts movies where half the action scenes are filmed in slow motion…and still work perfectly well (sometimes...

Lights, camera…Part III

I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning.

What you need to know up front (unless you are a total "surprise me" writer, who can't know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is like, 2)who the actors are in the scene, 3) where each of them is at any given time and what each of them is doing, 4) what you (and they) expect to get out of this, and 5) how all this interacts with the larger...

Lights, camera…Part II

So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level.

Action can be "seen" by the reader from lots of different levels. A bird's eye view is a Big Picture description that is most often employed when describing a full-scale battle (but it can work quite well for smaller fights); a general's view is...

Lights, camera…what?

Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they're pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I've said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that's full of how-to-write books - five shelves of them - and couldn't find even one that really talked about writing action scenes. (A couple of them pretended to, but what they were actually talking about usually turned out to be plot, or else conflict or s...

On critiquing

Before you start critiquing someone else's work, you are best off asking a few questions. Not questions about the story - usually, one of the things the writer is looking for is a fresh eye, a virgin reader, someone who has no idea what the story is about or what the writer was trying to accomplish, so that the writer can find out whether she got it across or not.

No, what you want to ask is stuff like: Do you want me to note typos and incorrect punctuation, or not, or only if it's a...

The care and feeding of first readers

I promised a while back that I'd post on training first-readers (or beta readers, or critiquers, or whatever you personally call them). I already talked about the difficulty of finding good crit, so I'll try not to repeat too much of that.

Working with first-readers starts with finding some folks who are  a) articulate people whose judgement the writer trusts, or is at least willing to listen to, b) willing to read and comment on your work, in exchange for similar commentary on theirs or...

One down, many to go…

I am home again after another four-day trip to Chicago to get my Dad's taxes signed and meet with the lawyer about family business stuff. I am more than a little chuffed, because this is the first time in at least six years that Dad hasn't needed to file an extension. (You all did notice that the date on this is the 14th, right? Cue fireworks and balloons…)

I am having to remind myself about once an hour that Dad's taxes being done does not mean I can run out and take on a new project. After a...

Information and how to dump it

Infodumps - those long passages of narrative summary that provide a huge wodge of background or plot development or characterization - have an undeservedly bad reputation among would-be writers. The allergy to infodumps is a bit of stylistic advice which is largely peddled to beginning writers, but which is not upheld by looking at real live published fiction. Infodumps that are ineffective, boring, annoying, or unnecessary should be cut, obviously, but that is by no means the same thing as "...

Thinking it through

I seem to have acquired a reputation as some sort of worldbuilding maven, probably based on the Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions I came up with as a personal crutch during my middle career. I don't actually think the reputation is deserved - really, it should belong to someone who does a much better job of worldbuilding than I do - but it's really not worth trying to argue.

The thing I actually want to talk about is why I came up with the Worldbuilding Questions in the first place. I've said...