Rainbow | Realm of Stories
asked
Michael Grant:
Hi, Michael Grant! Your Gone series is gripping and absolutely fantastic! I still have yet to read Light. I bet it's going to be very emotional! Did you carefully plan out most of what was going to happen when you're writing the Gone novels, or did you mostly made up the story as you went along? Have you got any advice on writing action and romance scenes? How many hours on average do you write per day?
Michael Grant
When I start a series what I have is my 'series bible.' This is a rundown of characters and settings, the rules of my world, decisions about person and tense. And from there I just make it up each day.
My advice on romantic scenes is that they work a whole lot better when the characters love each other, and we the readers know that they love each other. If you've built up to it properly the scene will write itself because you'll know the characters intimately and so will the reader.
Action scenes? All about detail and pacing and making it work within your framework, which means you need to write the scene to work within the limits of your environment - no cheating and suddenly inventing some deus ex machina.
Detail is important. If someone is stabbed with a knife, what's the knife look like? What's its weight? Where does it stab? How much resistance is there? Does it catch momentarily on a rib? Does it go in all the way to the hilt? How does the blood behave?
Obviously you don't want to overdo it, but detail makes it feel real. Lack of detail makes it look like the writer wasn't really seeing the scene, or else that the writer looked away out of squeamishness. But if you want readers to believe you, you have to be the reliable, unflinching witness accurately describing the scene.
Then, there's pacing. You want to change up the speed so that some parts of an extended action scene seem a blur and others are horribly specific. A level, same-speed narration gives us a sense of distance, of a writer describing something objectively. You don't want objective. You want very subjective, even if you're in 3rd person past tense, you want the reader to feel the fear, feel the intensity, feel out-of-control, swept along. Do that by changing speeds, changing focus, raising and lowering the sound volume, slowing to look with almost too much care at some specific detail, then accelerating in a blur. Because that is how we actually experience intense situations.
My advice on romantic scenes is that they work a whole lot better when the characters love each other, and we the readers know that they love each other. If you've built up to it properly the scene will write itself because you'll know the characters intimately and so will the reader.
Action scenes? All about detail and pacing and making it work within your framework, which means you need to write the scene to work within the limits of your environment - no cheating and suddenly inventing some deus ex machina.
Detail is important. If someone is stabbed with a knife, what's the knife look like? What's its weight? Where does it stab? How much resistance is there? Does it catch momentarily on a rib? Does it go in all the way to the hilt? How does the blood behave?
Obviously you don't want to overdo it, but detail makes it feel real. Lack of detail makes it look like the writer wasn't really seeing the scene, or else that the writer looked away out of squeamishness. But if you want readers to believe you, you have to be the reliable, unflinching witness accurately describing the scene.
Then, there's pacing. You want to change up the speed so that some parts of an extended action scene seem a blur and others are horribly specific. A level, same-speed narration gives us a sense of distance, of a writer describing something objectively. You don't want objective. You want very subjective, even if you're in 3rd person past tense, you want the reader to feel the fear, feel the intensity, feel out-of-control, swept along. Do that by changing speeds, changing focus, raising and lowering the sound volume, slowing to look with almost too much care at some specific detail, then accelerating in a blur. Because that is how we actually experience intense situations.
More Answered Questions
A Goodreads user
asked
Michael Grant:
What was the message you were trying to send in the series? You know! Like, the theme.
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