Some authors get famous for their style, or at least get their fame attributed to style. Hemmingway, for instance; ask somebody why he’s famous ,and odds are that you’ll get something along the lines of ‘short sentences’. That’s not the
If you’ve ever trawled the waters of the internet for fiction prose, you know there are vast depths of it out there, most of it terribly written, much of it morally degrading filth. The filth can be thrown out, ignored;
Authors have Opinions on symbolism. Some of us hate it, call it useless frippery. Some of us love it, call it the lifeblood of the story, the path to true depth. Some of us think its nice but can’t figure
Tension has a mortal enemy: the answer. Tension abhors the answer. Unfortunately for us, readers sometimes learn the answer too early. There are all sorts of ways to learn. Genre savvy, for instance, could inform them that the story almost
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
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