Where Normal Need Not Apply
Beyond the vague instruction to “write well,” what can we do to increase the connection readers feel with our story? Jefferson Smith shares specific things we can do that will make our stories more immersive.
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One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to Show, Don’t Tell. In many cases, that’s good advice, but as with most advice, that “rule” is imperfect and incomplete.
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It’s tricky to tie up all the threads in our story’s Climax and even harder to give guidelines for how to write it, but let’s try to identify some story aspects we might want to include.
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It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about how to take the major beats of a beat sheet and apply them to our story’s genre.
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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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We’ve been talking about antagonists lately, and how some writers minimize the conflict in their stories, even though “good fiction is the path of greatest resistance.” In a perfect bit of serendipity, a guest post by Janice Hardy today addresses the most common myth about conflict.
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Over the past couple of weeks, Kristen Lamb has been kind enough to let me share her insights on antagonists: what they are, why they help define our story, how to strengthen them, etc. Today, we’re exploring how antagonists create our story from beginning to end.
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In a “man vs. self” story, we can’t just show a character arguing with themselves. Instead, Kristen shows us how to use a technique like in the movie Black Swan—where the outward antagonists represent the protagonist’s own issues.
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All great stories are about one thing and one thing only—problems. More specifically? Every good story has one core problem in need of being resolved. Today, Kristen Lamb shares her insights into how problems, conflicts, and antagonists drive our story.
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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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