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,
Some parts of life require more care than others to depict. Last week I covered the depiction of sins, particularly the lurid sins that make us wince: rape, adultery, murder, jaywalking. These sins, we concluded, are not wrong to write
Are there parts of life it is wrong to imitate in art? The question may rise in your mind when you’re writing a story and come to the part with the triple murder-suicide that ends in a catastrophic genocidal explosion,
Today’s article is a follow up on last week’s, and as a result of that, it’s not so much one article as two mini-posts put together, one on each of the topics I promised last week. Section One: Isn’t It
We worry about contrivance and coincidence in our stories. For instance, in my novel, Why Ought I to Die?, the ending relies in large part on the main character being at a specific place at a specific time1, a place
We’ve gone over the ways you can lie in Part One, but that’s only half the battle. In fiction, a bad lie kills your story; a good lie (almost always) requires you to tell the truth eventually, finds its virtue
The first rule of lying to your reader: Don’t lie. The second rule? Lie to them all you like, as long as you’re telling the truth. Plot twists, that fabled love of many an over-enthusiastic author, rely upon such lies.
Due to its c. 5500 word length, I’ve split this paper into three parts. This is Part Three of three (find One and Two here). Works Cited & and the full paper can be found here. The benefits of art