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,
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.
What makes a character relatable? Too much writing advice, particularly from woke activists, centers around using the character’s demographic and sociological traits to make them relatable. Black people, they say, need black characters to relate to. Asians need Asians. Polynesians
In The Three Uses of the Knife1, pages 73-75, David Mamet explains how, in his view, people reframe every time-sequence they find into a story, integrating each new fact of it by adjusting the story’s whole to fit: he avers