Tension is an essential element of most stories. Tension is an unanswered question, and the reader wants the answer to that question, wants to see not only the answer but how the answer comes about. The story, “Lily went to
Description is a fundamental part of the art of writing. Characters, items, landscapes, sounds, smells, emotions, actions, they all need to be described for the reader to apprehend their existence. Each one has its own set of possible characteristics. Each
The Holy Grail of characters, according to the internet, is the ‘rounded character’. We, as authors, must strive for a thoroughly realistic person, somebody complex and flawed and capable of surprising the reader at every turn. Sometimes, the demand is
* * 1 * * He came on the summer solstice, walking out from under the sun’s setting orb into the town, and he had upon his head a black hat, upon his feet black boots, free of dust, upon
Classifying stuff is a classic pass-time for scientists, critics, and the parents of young children who want to decide whether the brown goo on the floor is baby food or something… more odiferous. Unfortunately, unlike brown-goo-on-the-floor, characters have more than
As one of the big three of writing (whichever big three you subscribe to, mine or the conventional grade school model or something else1), the character-aspect of your story obviously deserves a lot of thought and care. The number of
Efficiency. It means that every word that isn’t doing something good is doing something bad. Every sentence that doesn’t need to be there is a sentence that shouldn’t be there. Every paragraph that could be safely skipped is a paragraph
Third person near is the closest-to-standard perspective there is. Among the big three- first person, third person omniscient, and third person near- it’s a slightly-more-removed version of the first, the common default of the second (I’ll explain this in a
I’ve read some books; you’ve read some books. You, like me, have noticed that some books use ‘he’ for the protagonist and some use ‘I’. If you’re truly adventurous, you may even have encountered the dread ‘you’ protagonist. Thus far,
Notes from Interview, 11/19/2*** “I blew his brains out.” Those were the first words the prisoner said to me when I sat down across from him. He’s a tall man, thin, with strong, ink-stained fingers and stubble- rough, not sloppy-