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It’s the Little Things
It’s a generally-accepted truism that what makes for good, effective description is a combination of careful observation and a keen eye for the telling details. What isn’t said so often is that you...
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The Inverse of Robert Burns
The Scots poet Robert Burns wrote, famously, of being able to look at oneself as an outside observer: O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free...
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More Than Meets the Eye
It’s time to talk for a minute about description. A story needs description, as part of the process of enabling readers to re-create the imagined world of the story inside their own head. In science...
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Besetting Sins
All writers have them – those prose tics they exhibit when the going is either too fast, or too slow, for them to notice the word-by-word; those all-too-easy-to-fall-back-on scenes and tropes that can...
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Gently Does It
Or, yet another cause of reader disgruntlement. Readers – especially readers of fiction — don’t like being pushed to a particular conclusion. They want to feel like they got there all by themselves....
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Wheels and Gears
I’m not going to talk here about “plot-driven” versus “character-driven” stories, because that’s a distinction made by critics, which is to say, from the outside looking in, whereas most writers find...
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The Muse at War
It’s possible to go through an entire writing career without having to send your characters off to war. But even in the most unlikely of genres – “sex and shopping” summer beach novels, or literary...
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The I’s Have It
As a general rule, when you’re writing in first person, it helps to know the narrator’s assumed reader or listener – that is, the fictional person or persons that your fictional speaker is speaking or...
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Thought for the Day
A piece of fiction is a carefully-crafted series of lies told to the reader, which the reader agrees to believe for the duration of the story. Anything that threatens the fragile nature of this...
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Things Seen and Unseen
Let’s talk for a minute about point of view. In fact, we could talk about point of view for considerably …Continue reading →
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