Where Normal Need Not Apply
With a “master list of craft skills,” we know what skills to study. Here’s my master list of Line Editing skills. What craft skills do we need to understand and be able to apply to develop our voice and writing?
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Just because we’re skilled at nonfiction writing doesn’t mean we’re skilled at storytelling (or vice versa). To do both, we might have to unlearn a lot of what we’ve learned about writing. Today, Elizabeth Randolph shares her insights on changing writing styles.
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Deep POV relates the story from inside our character’s head, and subtext hides meanings between our words. Together, those concepts develop our characters and the relationship between them.
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It’s not always easy to know how much showing or telling works best for our story, so let’s dig a little deeper into some of the problems with trying to find the right balance of showing and telling in our stories.
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We’ve explored how antagonists act as the conflict-engine for our story, but our Big Boss Troublemaker isn’t in every scene. What keeps the rest of our story going? Kristen’s going to teach us today about scene antagonists.
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It’s hard to get our opening pages just right because we have to grab readers’ attention, introduce our characters and the story world, hint at a problem, etc. With everything we want to get across to the reader, we might dump too much information. How can we avoid info dumping or confusing readers at the beginning of our story?
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One of the many reasons we need feedback is to help us fill in the blanks for things we can’t see or for understanding how others might interpret our words. But what happens when readers see our words and understand our intention, but they don’t believe what we’re telling them?
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Many newbie writers try to perfectly replicate their ideas in their readers’ brains, even though overwriting slows down our pacing, repeats ideas, and prevents subtext. Luckily, Christina Delay is here with five steps to break the overwriting habit.
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Story description has a bad reputation for being “skippable,” but a story without description happens in a vacuum. Today, Janice Hardy is here to share advice and examples on how to make our descriptions less flat, less “told,” and therefore, less skippable.
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Today, Janice Hardy shares her revision advice on how to include the right amount of backstory. Too much slows the pace, and too little can leave readers confused. Her tips help us avoid the issue of slow pacing, learn how to hide backstory, and identify when we need more.
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