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Posts from the ‘Craft’ Category

Mar 29

Three posts to enhance your story’s emotional landscape

Below are three posts from me and Carly about enhancing the emotional landscape of your characters and stories.

In the post “Find your story’s emotional throughline” Carly writes about a babysitting experience she had where she learned about subtext–finding the real meaning beneath an event.

“Enrich your characters’ and readers’ emotional experience with these cues,” is a post about helping readers connect with your character’s emotions.

“Try these techniques to amplify emotion in your writing,” examines the use of anaphora to enhance your story’s emotional impact.

Mar 28

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Answer your pesky editing and writing questions with these resources

To capitalize or not. One word or two? These are two of many confounding questions we run into as editors and writers. I’m sure I’ll never have every grammar and usage rule at the top of my mind, so luckily I have resources to consult that keep me on the straight and narrow writing path.

If you’re puzzling over a grammar question, checkout — I mean check out — my go-to source: Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl: Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Fogarty also has a book by the same name, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

Here are recent word and usage questions I looked up.

Further vs farther – “Farther” is for for physical distance and “further” for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It’s easy to remember, says Fogarty, because “farther” has the word “far” in it, and “far” obviously relates to physical distance. Read more

Mar 25

How to stand out from the slush pile

One of the things I love about reading other people’s work is what I learn from it.

So, last year, when I was asked to be one of the judges for a prose competition, I said yes. The competition guidelines listed the areas we were to rank on a scored number system—things like characterization, setting, dialogue, point of view, etc.

Of the twenty or so submissions I read, there were a variety of stories—from a gothic, steampunk, coming-of-age story to a memoir about losing one’s memory in the aging process.

A few submissions stood out above the others like the shiny, bright agates my cousin and I would hunt for on the beaches of our childhood. These submissions wove all aspects of good writing and storytelling together into a whole that hooked my interest from the first line and never let go.

The majority of the submissions fell somewhere in the middle of the pile—not to be rude—but what I might call “mediocre land.” They weren’t poorly written but they didn’t grab ahold of me and say, “Read this, now!” In fact, in many cases, I couldn’t wait for the story to be over because I was bored.

So, what did I learn? Read more

Mar 22

What’s the worst thing you can do to your character and why?

One thing about writing that’s hard for me is being mean to my characters, well at least most of them. I suspect that certain scenes we write are our way of acting out and doing things fictionally that we can’t do in real life. But stories need conflict and so we have to do horrible things to characters at times so they can grow and change and we can advance the story. (Although I draw the line at hurting the dog.)

So what are some guidelines for doing this? Writer K.M. Weiland says the point is to not only up the stakes and create conflict, but to generate character growth and advance the character’s personal arc.

For more details, watch her 2:26-minute video.

For more inspiration from Weiland, follow her @KMWeiland and visit her website.

Mar 21

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Developing character emotions to create resonance

In my last post “Writing exercises to help you go deeper” I wrote about developing a writing exercise to help me delve into my story and focus on what my protagonist learned from her experiences and also how she grew from this knowledge or information.

It was pretty easy to come up with what she learned. For example, one of the things she had learned from her life experiences so far was that those who love her, eventually leave her. This is what she comes into the story with and, because she’s afraid of getting hurt, she guards her heart.

Over the course of the story, she learns to trust again. She learns that “leaving” is an illusion and that love is never-ending. Read more

Mar 20

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How author Jo Knowles uses storyboarding to imagine her stories

Even though I suspect I have a drawing deficiency, I’m intrigued by drawing and by how writers can use it to outline and build out stories. Drawing can bring ideas and insight to the surface.

So I was especially excited to read an interview that Debbie Ridpath Ohi conducted with award-winning writer Jo Knowles. Knowles has a master’s degree in children’s literature and has taught writing for children in the MFA program at Simmons College.

In this interview posted on Inkygirl.com, Knowles talks about her writing process and how she uses storyboarding to advance her writing. She says creating a storyboard helps her, “get organized, and figure out themes, plot and rhythm of the book.” Read more

Mar 19

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Writing exercises to help you go deeper

The other day, I was thinking about the types of memoirs I enjoy reading and what it is about them that sets them apart. Mostly, they were memoirs, such as Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, that weren’t just, “this happened to me,” type of stories.

The strongest memoirs are stories that show us how the person’s circumstances changed them. They answer the question, “What did I learn from my experience and how did I grow from this experience?”

I designed a couple of writing prompts based on my thoughts about memoir and decided they would be good prompts to ask of the protagonist in my fantasy novel as well. I uncovered some interesting material for my story. Read more

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