Scenes

Being a Better Writer: Getting by on as Little Detail as Possible

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Hello there readers! Welcome back to Being a Better Writer! I hope you’ve all had a great weekend, got some fun reading done. I certainly did. I made a jaunt to my local library, picked up, and have already read through one of the books I knew I needed to bring up at one of my panels at LTUE. Which is a good segue into some quick news reminders about LTUE. It’s almost upon us, people! In fact, it’s just over a week away! So you’re pretty much at the last chance grab your registration in advance! If you don’t now, you’d best be prepared to pay your way in at the door!

Once you’re there, though, you’ll have a veritable smorgasbord of writing advice and guidance available to you from hundreds of panels, all of which you can see in a grid here (PDF warning; it’ll likely download on a mobile). By the way, some of those panels? I’m on them! So swing by if you’re at LTUE, as they’re some excellent panels on excellent writing topics!

Now, with the LTUE reminder taken care of, let’s get down to business with today’s post. Today I wanted to talk about getting by on as little detail as possible. Or, from my perspective, one of the core components of a short story.

Okay, I realize that might sound a bit strange to some of you. And others might be nodding. Or wondering about other core components of short stories, which there definitely are a few of (for example, a really core one is a story that fits inside a short … which is another topic for another time).

But getting by on as little detail as possible is key for keeping a short story, well, short. See, it’s one thing in a book to have a character come into a setting and take a quick look around it, noting who is present and who’s speaking to who, or perhaps what the setting itself looks like. After all, with a traditional book you’ve got hundreds of pages waiting to be filled, so spending a hundred words establishing a setting for the next few pages? Not such a big deal. In fact, it’s expected.

For a short story, however, where you’re limited in both space and wordcount, taking those hundred words to describe a setting or a scene? Suddenly they’re a much larger blow against the “budget” of space you have to work with. And if you go ahead and write as though you have all the space available to you as one normally would, upon reaching the end you might find that your “short story,” initially directed to be around a few-thousand words, is now nearing novella size.

Whoops.

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Being a Better Writer: Micro-Blast #7 – The Anti-Story, Sleep, Knowledge, Capitalism

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Welcome back readers! And welcome to the new readers! Life, The Universe, and Everything is over, but I can already see from the stats page that we have some newcomers! Welcome! Whether you’re here to look at my books, or here for some weekly Being a Better Writer, welcome all the same!

So then, let’s get down to business with this week’s post, which is … a Micro-blast. Number seven, to be exact. What’s a Micro-blast? Well, it’s what happens when I near the end of a list of writing topics I’ve made for BaBW, and some of them just aren’t quite worth a full post, but are still worth discussing. Micro-blasts are a good way to bridge the gap, combining several shorter topics into one post so that there’s still a decent amount of material covered. Readers get a variety of subjects, and I get to clear some shorter topics and concepts off of my list.

Sound pretty straightforward? Good! Then let’s go!

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Being a Better Writer: Imagery and Metaphor

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Reaching the end of Topic List XI folks! Only a few more to go! But before we go diving into today’s Being a Better Writer post, a few bits of news to take care of.

So, the weekend sale and the dearth of sales before it. According to a comment left on the original post, I’m not the only author who saw a sudden drop around that time, so Unusual Events’ involvement may have been a coincidence, the drop being something larger sweeping through the book world. School year starting? Something else? I don’t know. But it appears it wasn’t just me that felt it.

Thankfully, the weekend sale seems to have done pretty well, with Colony and Shadow of an Empire selling a good number of copies. Hopefully the momentum gained carries on through now that the sale is over and keeps it back at what it was before things took a swift downward dive, but if nothing else there was a weekend of good sales numbers that hopefully leaves some happy readers craving more.

So, that’s the news so … Oh wait, there’s one more thing. Someone did ask my opinion on the Fantastic Beasts Nagini “controversy” and if I was going to do a post on it. A full post? For something so ridiculous? No. But I can address it in a paragraph or two.

The gist of it? The newest trailer for Fantastic Beasts 2 revealed that Nagini, the pet snake of the big bad in the original Harry Potter series, may in fact be a Naga, and is a character in the new Fantastic Beasts film. Well, almost immediately after this reveal, the film (and Rowling) came under attack for casting an Asian actress as the character, saying that it was accusing all Asians of being reptiles, etc etc. The usual stupid, easily-offended-but-completely-uneducated-social-justice-virtue-signal stuff.

Rowling’s response was to politely point out that Naga are a southern Asia mythology, hailing from that culture, so in addition to the actress’ talent at the role, it was an accurate choice given the myths, legends, and source of Naga. Now, with sane, rational people who aren’t just looking to jump on the latest bandwagon of “look what makes me so woke” things would have stopped there. But they didn’t. Instead the attacks immediately changed to a variety of secondary “social justice” standbys: Cultural appropriation, Nagini was Voldemort’s pet so clearly this is saying all women are pets to men, etc etc etc.

The lack of logic is truly staggering. It’s perpetually-offended folks wanting to be perpetually offended and doing everything they can to try and take some sort of imaginary “moral high ground” to shame everyone else and gain a measure of power over them. Look at that initial chain of “How dare you have an Asian actress portray this mythological creature” to “That creature’s from that part of the world? Then how dare you ‘appropriate’ that myth!”

It’s a strange “game” these morons want everyone else to give them.

Right, that said, let’s get on to today’s BaBW post and talk a little bit about imagery and metaphor.

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Being a Better Writer: Showing Character and Setting with Small Details

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First of all, I apologize for how late this post is (it’s Tuesday). Turns out, I’d almost forgotten that I had a meeting at my part-time Monday. Now, I can’t work currently, but I can attend a meeting. So I did, forgetting until Sunday night that this automatically conflicted with the Monday morning Being a Better Writer post. I then got up a little early to try and work something out, but didn’t get too far before I had to head off to work.

Side note: The knee is still recovering. Trying to get my back pay for the several weeks worth of work I was unable to do. We’ll see what happens. Wish me luck!

Anyway, so today’s topic. I want to dive right into this one headway, because it’s a good one. Often here before I’ve talked about show versus tell, right? And yes, that’s show versus tell, not show don’t tell. The first is proper (all things in balance). The latter is overblown purple prose taught as a guideline to push writers into showing, but then unfortunately not untaught.

Anyway, there are, if memory serves, several blog posts on that very topic here on the site. But I want to go one step further and tackle something that usually comes right on the heels of telling someone to “show” something.

The question of “how?”

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Being a Better Writer: Order of Operations

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Hello again, readers, and welcome to yet another Being a Better Writer post with an ominous, math-based title!

I know, I know. Forty percent of you clicked away after reading that sentence. Another fifty percent didn’t make it past seeing the title. And the twenty percent that are left? They know what’s wrong with that last statement.

Actually, if you’re quick on the uptake, you might have realized that there’s more than one error in that last paragraph. The first most probably spotted, but the second …? Well, it has to do with our title, which means that this is as good a point as any to dive right in and get into things.

So, let’s go ahead and start then. Except … unlike normal, I actually want to start today with a bit of a hands-on moment. A writing prompt, if you will. You may have noticed that there’s a scenic picture below. See it? You might need to hit the jump. Anyway, it’s a picture of the Kennecott Copper Mine ghost town in Alaska. This particular picture was shared to Reddit, IIRC, so hopefully it’s all right to use it here. I didn’t take it, is what I’m saying, and the goal here is to use it for educational purposes. You can click on it to see it in all its glory (which I recommend).

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Being a Better Writer: What’s a Memorable Scene?

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This post was originally written and posted September 8th, 2014, and has been touched up and reposted here for archival purposes.

Still off the grid in Alaska. This post was uploaded ahead of time for your viewing pleasure.

Welcome back for today’s Being a Better Writer post. It is a bit more nebulous topic, and so I’m going to try and approach it in a bit more relaxed manner. Rather than moving from point to point, or even prepping more than the initial idea beforehand, I’m just going to talk about it and see where things go. Partially because I feel like being a bit more relaxed today, partially because I want to see how well this works, and lastly because the topic itself can be a little nebulous.

So, what does make a memorable scene? And here’s where we run into a few differences, right with the first answer. Because to me what makes a scene memorable is something important happening. But that might not be the same answer that others give. In fact, others might give a completely different assessment of what makes a scene memorable. Perhaps it has to do with the main characters. Perhaps it’s the final battle, the most energetic portion of the story. Even upon thinking about it, my own answer that it is something important doesn’t exactly hold a sum total, because there’s a secondary element to consider, in that it be interesting. For me, these are two things that I put into my mind when I’m writing: What’s important about this scene? And is it interesting?

But that probably isn’t what’s going through other writers or readers heads when they do their own scenes. They might be going for clever dialogue. Or maybe even a funny joke.

So why when I’m asked what makes a memorable scene, do I think of importance and interest? I think part of it comes from what I’m looking at as a writer. The last thing that I want my reader to do is be forced to slog through things that aren’t important. Look, let’s be honest, anyone with half a decent talent for prose can sit down and write a lovely several thousand word piece on a character’s experience of cleaning a kitchen. Sliding the washrag across the counter, doing the dishes, cleaning the windows, putting things away … this can be done pretty easily.

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