Status Updates From Writing for Story: Craft Se...

^Simplicity, coupled with clarity, equals elegance.^

^One useful analogy to sequencing in prose is the frame-by-frame progression of a movie film. Each frame is different enough from the one before that the viewer gets an impression of motion, but not so different that the motion seems jerky.^

cont'd

By polishing the dramatic high points first, you achieve a clearer grasp of exactly how you must lead the reader up to those high points.

The important-scene-first approach is also the most efficient. The dramatic high points of a story are the first ones nailed down and the ones which, once nailed down, are most likely to remain as they are.^

^This is as it should be, and you should polish your story the way you wrote it, without regard to sequence, concentrating first on the most critical scenes and then working down the list in order of importance.

The writing process is, after all, also a thinking process; this remains true until the last word is written.

^Good polish grabs the reader with its active imagery and propels him into the story, where he is captured and moved along by the underlying structure. The active images follow one another like the frames of a moving picture, catapulting the reader from focus to focus as the story unfolds.^

^Polish is but the plaster on the walls of structure. Done in a craftsmanlike fashion it reflects and highlights the dramatic architecture of the story, but it is never more than a facade. Structural flaws will inevitably show through.^