writing tips

Quick Link: The Basics of Show Don’t Tell

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I know, I know. We share a lot of “show don’t tell” posts. But in my defence, I think it is one of those subjects that seems easy until you try and do it and this is a really great post by  at Pub Crawl. She has some excellent examples.

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The Basics of Show Don’t Tell

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Hi all; Julie here! Today’s post goes back to basics with a discussion of Show Don’t Tell. (For other approaches to this rule, you can read JJ’s piece on balancing the mix of showing and telling, Pub Crawl alum Susan Dennard’s post on using showing and telling on macro and micro levels, and Kat’s approach to when to show and when to tell.) There are few rules of craft that can be applied to a draft that will lift the level of the writing with the same effect as this simple rule. With every first draft I write, I find I fall into the lazy habit of telling, and with each revision, I look for places I can show more. Some basic rules are basics for good reason. 🙂
Let’s start with the real nitty-gritty. What does it mean to “show” or “tell” in your writing?One simple way of thinking about it is this:

  • Writing that “shows” creates a mental image and lets the reader draw conclusions about what’s happening.
  • Writing that “tells” explains what’s happening and provides the writer’s own conclusions.

For example:

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Quick Links: Lesser-Known Character Archetypes

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There are certain characters you need in a story. You need a protagonist and antagonist of course, but you also need supporting characters as well.  Over at Writers Helping Writers, Becca Puglisi shares some other character archetypes that can add to your story.  What are your favorite archetypes?

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Lesser-Known Character Archetypes

 by BECCA PUGLISI

One of the biggest pitfalls for writers is falling into cliché, and some of the biggest clichés happen with our characters. While the common archetypes work and are typically necessary, there are others that can be utilized to add interest, uniqueness, and dimension to our stories. Jonathan Vars is here today to talk about some of these characters and how they might be of use to you.

Every story contains certain character archetypes—custom molds, if you will, that carry with them certain recognizable traits. These types are instantly recognizable, the most famous being the hero and villain matchup. Other favorites are the sidekick, the mentor, and the love interest.

While these archetypes are perfectly acceptable, writers should be aware that there are literally dozens of others, all of which contain valuable assets to thicken the plot of a story. Here are three lesser-known archetypes that writers should become familiar with and consider adding to their toolbox:

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Quick Link: How to Keep Readers Happy When Your Character’s Unlikeable

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Have you read or seen Gone Girl? That is the kind of character you kind of like to hate. It is a different type of character but one that can be really interesting if done well. Holly Brown shares her thoughts on unlikeable characters and how to incorporate them into your story. Head over to Writer Unboxed and check it out! 

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How to Keep Readers Happy When Your Character’s Unlikeable

Please welcome Holly Brown as our guest today. Holly is the author of Don’t Try to Find Me, A Necessary End, and—just this month!—This is Not Over. In addition to being a novelist, she is also (in no particular order): a wife, mother, marriage and family therapist, poker enthusiast, resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, member of the SF Writers Grotto, lover of some incredibly shameful reality TV, devotee of NPR (she owes a debt of gratitude for inspiring more than one novel), and a believer that people should always be willing to make mistakes and always be the first to apologize for them. As a writer, she tends to be inspired by contemporary events and phenomena. She likes to take an emotionally charged situation and then imagine the people within it. That’s where her background in human dynamics comes into play, and where the fun begins.

I like unlikable characters, dammit! Always have, even before I was writing them myself, and they can always use a champion.

Connect with Holly on her blog, Bonding Time on Psych Central, and on Facebook.

How to Keep Readers Happy When Your Character’s Unlikeable

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl broke the glass ceiling by allowing female characters to be as unlikeable as males have often been in fiction. For too long, women writers in particular were hamstrung by the need for relatability, which could lead to muted characters, dulled at the edges, your stereotypical women in jeopardy, more acted upon than acting. Here are some ideas on how to build vivid, complex characters who are as satisfying to read as they are to write.

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Quick Link – The Aspiring Writer: Impostor Syndrome

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What makes someone a “writer”? Do you sometimes feel like a fake and are just waiting for people to notice? J.F. Gibson has a great piece about dealing with imposter syndrome as a writer. Check it out! You will feel better!

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The Aspiring Writer: Impostor Syndrome

Impostor syndrome isn’t a new concept, it’s something most people will encounter during their life. For a writer, impostor syndrome manifests itself in our psyche, laying a veil of self-doubt over our thoughts and actions. We continually feel our writing is inadequate and rubbish, and that nothing we write will be good enough. Ever.

In severe cases, impostor syndrome will cause writer’s block that will make you cry with frustration, causing your creativity to disappear when you need it most. In the worst of cases, some writers even stop writing.

So how do you deal with impostor syndrome? How do you get past the feelings of feeling like a fraud and a phony who will be soon found out, embarrassed and publicly shamed?

Call yourself a writer, and believe it

The first hurdle is actually believing you are worthy of calling yourself a writer. The impostor syndrome loves this stage, citing phrases in the back of our minds such as:

‘You have the audacity and arrogance to call yourself a ‘writer’?’

‘What have you ever achieved to warrant the title ‘writer’?

The truth is, it’s pretty simple: if you write, you are a writer. Are you a successful writer? Are you a published writer? Well, maybe not yet, but you are still, by definition a writer. So own it.

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Quick Link: Ten Crazy Realities About Writing a Sequel

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Do you write with the knowledge of a possible sequel in your head or are you one of those authors that waits to see if there is some success with your story and then worry about a sequel? I believe that you really have to think about a series or sequels just to get enough traction to gain a decent size audience.  What are your thoughts?  At Jenny Bravo Books, Jenny shares her experiences with writing a sequel.

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Ten Crazy Realities About Writing a Sequel

by Jenny Bravo

Friends, family, coworkers, and strangers who found me on Pinterest: here are a few things you should know before we dive into this post.

1. I wrote a novel. And as of last week, I wrote a second one. That Was the Year will be making its debut into the world in the near-ish future, so until then, you should probably check out These Are the Moments, aka novel #1, aka #TATM.

2. Writing a novel is a strange process. It’s kind of like giving birth, except from your brain. (Okay, that’s a weird analogy. Let’s pretend this didn’t happen.) If you’re looking for a place to start diving into your writing adventure, there are tips over here.

3. And the last thing you should know is that I need to go to sleep, but I wanted to write to you instead. I don’t know why you need to know that, but there it is.

Okay, let’s begin.

1. You still don’t know what you’re doing.

I’ll be honest with you: it was really hard for me to start this second novel. In this book, there were way too many possibilities of where the story could lead. But also? I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe I’ll never know what I’m doing. I’ll just keep writing and pivoting and filling the pages.

So, don’t beat yourself up. The trick is to admit that you’re not an expert, then work like crazy to make words happen.

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Quick Links: Are You Characters Contradicting Themselves?

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Don’t you hate it when you are totally into a character and fully invested in their story and then they do something so different from who they are that it jars you right back to reality? Janice Hardy has great advice on how to avoid this in your writing.

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Are Your Characters Contradicting Themselves?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Back in June, I caught that nasty flu that was going around and spent a few miserable weeks napping and watching a lot of TV. One of my distractions of choice was the show, Bones. It had been a long time since I’d seen the first few seasons, and while it was fun to re-watch them, one thing did annoy me.

The character Temperance “Bones” Brennan is a world-class forensic anthropologist who is very literal-minded and repeatedly says she doesn’t like psychology and doesn’t do motive.

Yet…

She’s a bestselling author who writes mysteries.

Writing is all about characters and why they do what they do. Motive is what’s driving every character to act—especially in a mystery.

Someone who doesn’t understand why people act and how emotional minds work would never be able to write great mysteries.

It’s a TV show, I get it, they wanted to make her famous and awesome on multiple fronts. And for all I know, her books are more procedural and less character, but that’s not how they’re described or referred to in the show itself.

One major aspect of the character, Bones, contradicted the core of who she is—and that bugged me every time they brought it up.

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Quick Links: How to Write 10,000 Words in a Day, and Why You Should Give It a Shot (at least once)

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What is the most words you have written in day? Have you ever done 10K? I have a couple of times during NaNoWriMo, when life almost got in the way of completing my 50K words. It is not something I think I could do often, but I understand why at Kill Zone thinks you should try it at least once.

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How to Write 10,000 Words in a Day, and Why You Should Give It a Shot (at least once)

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And this is what my hair looked like when I was done….

The most words I’ve ever written on a fiction manuscript in a fourteen hour period is 11,214. I was on a solo writing retreat in a secret location (okay, it was at an AirBnB apartment in St. Louis), laboring over the final push for The Abandoned Heart. My deadline loomed, and I was finding myself way too distracted at home to get the book drafted in time. All told, over the three and a half days of my retreat, I wrote over 26,000 words—certainly more words than I’d ever written before on a first draft in any similar time period.

Part of why I was successful was that I knew I was paying for the time away from home, and I didn’t want to disappoint myself or anyone else. It cost me about $400 for the apartment rental, plus another $125 for gas (St. Louis is two hours away), groceries, and a couple of restaurant meals. My family paid, too, in that they had to pick up the slack at home. The circumstances were definitely extraordinary. But it wasn’t my first time at the Big Daily Word Count Rodeo.

I was lured into my first 10K day a few years back by my thriller writer friend, J.T. Ellison. She was looking for a partner in crime—someone to check in with, someone to be accountable to—and she knows I’m game for all sorts of shenanigans. We’ve climbed the 10K summit many times now, and we even have tee shirts to celebrate our achievement.

If you peruse the Internet, you will find several examples of people talking about tackling the big 10K. But the methods all boil down to a few key elements.

Let’s talk about the whys first.

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Quick Links: 7 Serious Tips for Writing a Humor-Filled Novel

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As a big fan quirky funny books such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Universe or any of the late great Sir Terry Pratchett novels, I would love to be able to write humorous fiction. But writing funny stories is a lot harder than it looks and there is a bunch of interesting mechanics behind it. To learn more, check out the post by Jim Hardison at Writer’s Digest.

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7 Serious Tips for Writing a Humor-Filled Novel

By Jim Hardison

When you’re reading a book filled with humor writing that makes the milk you’re drinking squirt out your nose, like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the tone and the jokes often feel as natural and effortless as laughter. Right after wondering why the book didn’t come with a warning label about drinking milk while reading, you might even imagine that writing comedic material is easy. The truth is that writing great, silly fiction is hard, but it’s a skill you can hone if you’re willing to put in the same kind of effort you’d put into writing great serious fiction. So here are seven serious tips for writing a silly novel.

 

This guest post is by Jim Hardison. Hardison has worked as a writer, screen writer, animator and director in entertainment and commercials since graduating from Columbia College of Chicago in 1988. He is the author of The Helm, which YALSA praised as one of 2010’s best graphic novels for young readers. He co-founded Character LLC in 2000 and has given story advice to many of the world’s largest brands, such as Target, Verizon, Samsung, McDonalds and Walmart, and has even appeared on NBC’s “The Apprentice” as an expert adviser on brand characters. Hardison lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two kids and two dogs. Fish Wielder is his first novel.

1. Know your genre well enough to play with it.

The genre of your story can be a rich source of humor writing. Knowing your category will give you endless material to parody and poke fun at. Start by making a list of the conventions, clichés and tropes of your genre so that you can choose which ones to turn on their heads in your story. You can even find readymade lists of clichés on the submission guidelines pages of magazines and publishers where they note things they don’t want to see ever again. For example, the scifi and fantasy magazine Clarksworld has a list here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/submissions/ that includes talking cats and swords.

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Quick Links: Pros & Cons: Referencing the Real World in Our Story

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The wonderful Jamie Gold goes over the potential and pitfalls of using real world references in your story. A must read if you have ever considered doing this!

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Pros & Cons: Referencing the Real World in Our Story

by Jami Gold

I’ve often mentioned that I appreciate questions from readers (even though I can’t answer them all, especially with my health issues this year). Every question gives me ideas for potential blog posts, and today I’d like to thank Lee Green for the idea for this post (and Julie Sade for encouraging me to write it). *smile*I’ve run into the issue Lee mentions within my work as well, so I’m glad her question forced me to think deeper about the pros and cons. As with many things, we might answer one way at first glance but later discover a different angle that changes our opinion.

Lee asked:

“In a WIP, is it OK to have the lead female reading and maybe referring to a book written by a real life current author and naming that author, title of book and maybe a sentence from the book?”

That is a fantastic question that got my brain spinning in multiple directions. On the surface, it’s a question about copyright (and maybe the right to publicity), but deeper down, it’s a question about the relatability of our story and character. Let’s take a closer look…

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Quick Link: 12 Questions To Help You Create Memorable Characters

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We all want to make our characters compelling and having depth. I don’t know about you, but I have read some very good serials that have kind of lost me at the end because the hero/heroine was too perfect and always good.  No one is like that. Even Mother Teresa had her doubts. That is what makes a character relate-able and interesting.  Write To Done‘s Jack Woodville London has ideas on how to help you make your characters more interesting.

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12 Questions To Help You Create Memorable Characters

By Jack Woodville London
Would you like to create memorable characters? Of course you would!

But where do great characters come from?

Are they great because of what they do, or because of what they say?

Suppose someone walks into a store and asks, “May I see what you have in a nice .30 caliber hollow point?”

If this character is a combat infantry squad leader or deer hunter, if his greatest achievements are his marksmanship and taking a life here and there, you’d expect that he’ll think of buying bullets and shooting something.

But what if it’s 87-year-old Sister Agatha, who’s had enough of the bishop’s meddling with her side business in the communion wine trade?

She’s someone I want to know more about!

What makes Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice interesting?

It’s more than just her clever observations as a woman who won’t be treated with disrespect by a rich man; she is a clever woman wearing blinders, who discovered that it was she who was proud and prejudiced.

As for Monsieur Dantès of The Count of Monte Cristo, he sought (and got) revenge on those who buried him in the Chateau d’If, but didn’t know when to stop, becoming as bad as the people he hunted down and ruined.

Both became classic characters because the resolutions of their stories came with their realization of how wrong they had been all along.

They turned out to be different than who they, and we, thought they were.

They also turned out to be people that we think, deep inside, we could be.

This is a good place to restate the classic rule of character development: no hero should be without a flaw, no villain without a bit of good in his heart.

But to make them memorable, each must have something in their character that is different than our expectations, and theirs.

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Quick Links: Passing Time Is The Secret To Improving Your Story

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When we write, we get so deep into the story that sometimes it is hard to see any problems, especially ones that deal with the timeline of the story. But if you have been to any fan sites on the internet, you know your readers will figure out this plot hole fast.  from Standoutbooks will help you take control of time in your story and even use it to enhance your plot.

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Passing Time Is The Secret To Improving Your Story

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Time – the fourth dimension, and one over which an author possesses complete control. Like every aspect of a story, the way in which time passes is completely in the author’s hands. That I’m suggesting this is noteworthy may surprise you – you may think that time just happens as you write – but it’s an ability on which many authors fail to capitalize, and that’s frequently to the detriment of their stories.

Yes, as any sci-fi fan will tell you, time can go wrong. More than that, time can go wrong in ways you’ll never even notice, but that will jump out at your readers. Like all our articles, though, this isn’t just a warning; time can also go right, and a compelling sense of time passing can bring a story to life in ways you’d never expect. In this article, I’ll be talking about how authors can take control of time in their stories, and the advantages this can give them in crafting an engaging tale. To do that, let’s start with an example.

Time waits for no man (unless they’re an author)

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Quick Link: Critique Groups: 6 Ways they May Hurt Your Writing…and 6 Ways they Can Help

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Are you a member of a critique group? Anne R. Allen thinks they are a great resource for all writers. She also has a few cautions as well so whether you are in a group or not, go check out her article. 

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Critique Groups: 6 Ways they May Hurt Your Writing…and 6 Ways they Can Help

Critique groups have their pros and cons.

Wine helps…

by Anne R. Allen

I often advise new writers to join critique groups. Groups are usually free and they’re a great way to learn the basics of the writing craft. They can get writers out of their “writing garrets” and help newbies navigate the treacherous waters of the ever-changing publishing industry.

But I also warn writers to be wary. Never take what you hear in critique groups or workshops as gospel. Groupthink can be dangerous. Petty tyrants often hold sway and the Dunning Kruger Effect can demonstrate itself on a regular basis. (That’s the scientific theory that the most ignorant people are usually the most confident.)

Even when you’ve found a wonderful critique group that seems knowledgeable, helpful and kind, they can sometimes steer you wrong, simply because of the nature of the group set-up. If your group reads work aloud, you’ll run into one set of problems. If you send copy ahead of time and red-pencil it, you’ll have another. The simple time-lapse can cause hassles too.

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Quick Link: How to Describe a Character

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A good story character is one that readers connect with them, envision them in their mind. James Scott Bell has some great advice on character descriptions over at Kill Zone.

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How to Describe a Character

by James Scott Bell

Following up on my post on scene descriptions, I turn today to describing characters. The basic principle is the same: we want to create a feeling over and above a mere picture. And the way we do that is to filter impressions through the point-of-view character.

I’d like to break this subject down into two parts. First, how to describe the main character, the protagonist. Second, how to render the other characters through the eyes of the protagonist.

Main Character Description

There are two schools of thought when it comes to describing a main character.

The first is to give little or no visual info about the character. This allows the readers form their own picture. There’s a vividness that springs directly from the reader’s imagination.

This approach––minimalism––seems to be the preferred style these days. The exception may be category romance, which usually puts the main characters right on the cover.

If you want to offer a fuller character description, your challenge is two-fold. How much detail, and how to deliver it? In the past it was common to give full information via an omniscient POV, as in the beginning of Gone With The Wind:

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Quick Link: Using Internal Conflict to Create Plot

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Janice Hardy does it again with another great post! Are you struggling with adding depth to your story or just want to take it to another level? Head over to Writer’s In The Storm to learn how to use your protagonist’s inner conflict to help strengthen your plot.

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Using Internal Conflict to Create Plot

By Janice Hardy,

 

A lot of focus gets put on the core conflict of a novel–the main problem the protagonist has to solve to win. It’s no wonder since that’s the whole point of the book, but sometimes, when we look too hard at the external problems, we miss out on opportunities to let the internal problems muck things up. This is especially true in a character-driven novel, since that inner journey is what’s driving the entire book.If you’ve been struggling with a plot, or you’re looking for ways to deepen an existing plot, try looking at how your protagonist’s internal conflict is driving her external actions.

At the heart of every good internal conflict is a fear created by trauma. Something bad happened to that character at some point to scar her for life, and this fear affects how she makes decisions. This is usually the fear she must overcome by the end of the book to finally grow as a character and overcome whatever obstacle has been in her path.

Look at your protagonist and ask:

What’s her greatest fear?

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Quick Link: Creating a Satisfying Character Arc

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At Pub Crawl, author Julie Eshbaugh shares the importance of writing a great character arc. The point that I enjoyed most was how well she knows her characters to the point of being able to tell if an action was something they would perform or not. Check it out for more great tips!

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Creating a Satisfying Character Arc

 
Hi all! Julie here! Today I’d like to talk about character arc—what it is and why it matters. I’d also like to share my own personal approach to creating an arc for a character.
A character arc is the change that happens to a character in response to the events of the plot. A cowardly character might become brave, a stingy character might become generous, or a timid character might become confident.

Those are broad examples, of course. In practice, the change in your character over the course of your story may be more subtle or internalized. For instance, a character might believe in herself at the beginning of a story but be untested, so she may seem to be tentative and reserved. The obstacles she faces may not change her as much as reveal what was inside her all along. This is still a character arc! As long as a character changes and evolves in response to the plot—externally, internally, or both—there is an arc.

Character arcs matter because they lend significance to the plot of your story. Your character might face one life-or-death situation after the other, but if he emerges unchanged at the end of it all, it’s difficult for the reader to feel the magnitude of everything that happened. As readers, we may have very little in common with the characters we are rooting for, but we can relate to a character’s growth and development. We will feel more empathy and become more engaged with a character who shares our challenges and vulnerabilities, and who finds a way to overcome them or succeed in spite of them.

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