Dialogue adds immense interest to a story, but dialogue is hard to write. I don’t mean that it’s hard to write words that sound like real people talking, though that’s true too. What I’m talking about today is the not-so-simple mechanics of typing dialogue onto the page and punctuating it properly. Let me give you […]
Archives for September 2012
Crafting Better Beginnings
September 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment
(Part Two ) Opening Hooks and Setting Scenes that Don’t Get Weighted Down In Part One of CRAFTING BETTER BEGINNINGS, I gave examples of using too much back story, of actually polluting our story openings with information dumps. Today we’ll talk about opening hooks and setting scene. One of the big problems with poor beginnings […]
Crafting Better Beginnings
September 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment
(Part One) Examples on Stowing Away the Back Story and Cleaning Up Information Dumps Which opening is better? This one? There once was a prince named Erasté in a faraway land called Trevelyan. His father, King Elián Ruelle, was a kind a gracious ruler, loved by all — all but one. Faeries dwelt in the […]
The Power and the Fear of Creating
September 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This summer we’ve been talking about where story ideas come from. I hope we inspired some ideas. But sometimes when we say, “I don’t know what to write about,” it’s our way of saying that our dreams are bigger than our current abilities. Our imagination is powerful, and our skills may seem small by comparison… […]
