4 Secret Writing Skills

Fourth of July pet celebration and Independence day pets celebrating the United States and national federal holiday with dog puppy cat and kitten including bird and hamster wearing hats with 3D illustration elements.

Photo © Santalucia Art Inc.| Deposit Photos

Three corners in the intersection have disappeared under construction. Even though this construction is making the area better for walking, right now, it’s not good for walking!

This month, I’m in a book giveaway called Battles, Beasts, and Blessings. Isn’t that a great name? Please click the link and see if there are any fantasy stories that interest you. These are a great way to find new authors to read.

Onward to the topic. One of the things that concerns me is that we’re losing some of the writing skills in the quest to only help beginners. I found it interesting in a discussion with another writer about Shawn Coyne, a former editor and the man behind Story Grid, that he is struggling with terminology for what he is describing—I think—because it’s been long forgotten.

Everyone teaches the big brush strokes like plot, often wrapped up in outlining; anything that can’t be easily taught is given hasty brush strokes, but no specifics; anything deemed a skill writers always get wrong, no one talks about at all (flashbacks anyone?).

But after you master the big brush strokes, then what? I felt like I plateaued myself after I took Dean Wesley Smith’s online course on story structure (which does not involve outlining). It turned out I now need finer brush strokes.  Dean also is more concept-based, which is fine to a certain point, but I needed specifics.

Ergo, we have four secret writing skills because no one talks about them.

The Sense of Proportion. Despite the odd title, this is on story structure (but not from an outlining perspective). Most writing resources talk about three-act structure for novelists. Why? It’s easy to teach because it has a built-in structure, and everyone relates to movies.  It also lends itself to thinking that each part of the story is equal in length. The article describes extensively what goes in the middle,  and provides a hard number for how long the middle should be: 3/4s of the story.

Secrets: Pacing and the validation (the article just calls it the ending). Guess where it says flashbacks should go? The middle.

If you like dogs, read it for the illustration using a dachshund. I was totally delighted by that image.

Descriptions Readers Won’t Skip. This a fairly detailed article about how to balance doing description while avoiding doing too much.

Secrets: There’s solid advice on making your descriptions shorter without sacrificing what’s in them, something the description minimalists don’t discuss. The author also gives a tip on hiding a character in plain sight.

Spreading Dialogue: This whole discussion is a writing secret. This was just a small paragraph in a larger article From Zoa Sherburne in the Writer, January 1955. Heck, I almost passed the article by, but this was a useful small thing that you’ll find in books by longer-term writers.  It’s part of From Our Rostrum.

Most writers will write narrative and dialogue like this:

“Dialogue dialogue, dialogue.” Then three or four sentences of narrative. “More dialogue.”

Which makes for a big paragraph. Spreading dialogue is:

“A sentence of dialogue.”

Three or four sentences of narrative.

“Three sentences of dialogue.”

Two sentences of narrative.

It helps provide white space (something obviously needed even in the 1950s!) so the reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed by a large chunk of text. It also can be used as a pacing tool. Pretty cool.

Flashbacks: This shows up on every top ten list as “don’t.” Why? Because writers do them badly. Why do they do them badly? Because no one teaches how to them correctly. Why doesn’t anyone teach how to do them correctly? Because they don’t know how, so they tell everyone not to do them. Ugh!

But it also makes it a writing secret finding this pair of articles from the 1950s that explains how to do them. The key is the transitions, though in the proportions article, that author says flashbacks are middle story territory.

Operation Flashback (also you may want to explore the article The Gentle Art of Cutting)Triple Threat Flashback

I’m still hunting for articles on the forbidden territories of dreams and prologues.

In the meantime, happy Independence Day!