scenes

Quick Link: Why Layering Your Novel Is the Method for Success

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

C.S. Latkin’s always provides a great post, and this one is no exception. I love her use of building a house as an analogy for writing. I actually use the same analogy for building websites, so great mind, right? But if you want to able to write with more depth, something that separates you from the newbs, check this post out.

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Why Layering Your Novel Is the Method for Success

by C.S. Latkin

Last year I spent some months talking about layering scenes. As time goes on, I see how few writers—especially aspiring novelists—have any clue how to organize their scenes. They brainstorm their scene ideas once they’ve settled on a premise of sorts, and then they just start writing from scene one.

The result is usually disastrous.

While we read books from page 1 to the end, that is not the best way to lay out a novel. In fact, it’s probably the worst way.

Novels need to be built like houses. You don’t build a house by framing up a door, sticking the door in the doorway, then entering into . . . nothing. You don’t build in a linear direction, from front to back. And even though you do build vertically, from the ground up, there’s the issue of framework.

You have to build off your concrete slab or perimeter foundation first with a framework. If you’re building a house, that framework will consist of wood studs and posts hammered together according to your blueprint. Walls are built with studs at specific spacing, and the spaces for doors and windows are framed in with headers and supporting studs on the sides and where the sills will go.

All this to say: every structure relies on key supporting elements. Some supporting elements have to hold tremendous weights. You’ve probably seen open-beam ceilings, with maybe one giant wood beam traversing a huge room, seemingly holding up the whole roof.

Read the full post on Live Write Thrive

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Quick Link: Deeper Thinking About Writing Your Scenes

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

One of the reasons why I love Stephen King’s writing, besides the fact that he is amazing at story telling, is how he writes scenes. I grew up in Massachusetts and there are times when I will read one of Mr. King’s stories and the scene will be so realistic to me, I can smell it. Larry Brooks from Kill Zone shares on how to have a purposeful deeper scene that enhance your story.

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Deeper Thinking About Writing Your Scenes

by Larry Brooks

Deeper than what, you might fairly ask?

Perhaps, deeper than you’re thinking about them now. Because too often, newer writers (in particular) begin writing a scene without a clear intention for that scene. As a means of discovery (finding and vetting story options), this can be viable and legit…

… but unless you rethink and recast the scene once you do understand the purpose of a particular scene – its mission, if you will – chances are that scene will become a liability.

New writers tend to forget that next step.  The scene rambles, then it finds (perhaps stumbles upon) its purpose… then it’s on to the next scene.

If you have a bunch of scenes created this way, you may have tanked the whole novel on this one issue of craft alone.

Scene writing is its own core competency, separate from – yet every bit as essential as – the other primary core competencies you need to manifest: 1) a conceptually-rich premise, 2) character, 3) theme, 4) structure and 5) writing voice, including dialogue and the general nature of your narrative.

That’s six core competencies (categorically) in all.

Read the full post on Kill Zone

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Writing The Perfect Scene

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Today’s post by Randy Ingermanson – “the Snowflake Guy” originally appeared on his site, Advanced Fiction Writing. Need to learn how to structure a scene or just a refresher, then this article is for you!

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Writing The Perfect Scene

Having trouble making the scenes in your novel work their magic? In this article, I’ll show you how to write the “perfect” scene.

Maybe you think it’s impossible to write the perfect scene. After all, who can choose every word perfectly, every thought, every sentence, every paragraph? What does perfection mean, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t know. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Style is a matter of taste.

But structure is pretty well understood. Maybe you can’t write the perfectly styled scene. But you can write the perfectly structured scene. And that’s a whale of a lot better than writing a badly structured scene.

The Two Levels of Scene Structure

A scene has two levels of structure, and only two. They are:

  • The large-scale structure of the scene
  • The small-scale structure of the scene

This may seem obvious, but by the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it’s terribly profound. If you then want to fling large quantities of cash at me in gratitude, please don’t. I’d really rather have a check. With plenty of zeroes. I am going to steal insights from Dwight Swain’s book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. This is quite simply the finest book ever written on how to write fiction. If you don’t have this book, you are robbing yourself blind. I will be giving you the high points in this article, but there is really no substitute for reading the book and digesting it.

Before we begin, we need to understand how we keep score. How do we know what perfection is? The answer is based on understanding your reader’s motivation for reading.

Your reader is reading your fiction because you provide him or her with a powerful emotional experience. If you’re writing a romance, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is falling in love herself. If you’re writing a thriller, you must create in your reader the illusion that he is in mortal danger and has only the tiniest chance of saving his life (and all of humanity). If you’re writing a fantasy, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is actually in another world where all is different and wonderful and magical. And so on for all the other genres.

If you fail to create these emotions in your reader, then you have failed. If you create these emotions in your reader, then you have succeeded. The better you create the desired emotional experience in your reader, the better your fiction. Perfection in writing comes when you have created the fullest possible emotional experience for your reader.

Read the full post on Advanced Fiction Writing.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com