The Essentials of Orienting Your Reader
In film, orientation is almost immediate. In prose, oreintation requires ink. Here are some guidelines for what orientation the reader needs.
Advice and thoughts on narrating to best effect.
In film, orientation is almost immediate. In prose, oreintation requires ink. Here are some guidelines for what orientation the reader needs.
You can deliver exposition via dialogue, but you have to finesse it a little. Here we discuss how you can disguise exposition so it doesn’t feel contrived.
Earning story events means paying attention to three types of context (deep, situational, and immediate) as well as giving the character time to arrive at a response.
What is filtering, what’s the rationale for avoiding it, and in what situations might you want to stick with it?
Writing epiphanies and realizations can be difficult; how can you make them feel earned and not contrived? Here, we examine the keys to successful realizations in storytelling.
Objects are crucial to a story’s being unique and affecting. Here, we look at 5 ways to use objects to tighten up your story and make it more powerful.
Robert Olen Butler describes 5 ways the people express emotions. Writers can use these expressions to help build better character interiority. Here, his 5 expressions and an accompanying journal exercise.
An expert writer of stories needs to have some mastery of psychic distance—the distance the narrator stands from a character’s emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. No matter what viewpoint or person or verb tense you’re using for your story, your narration will sometimes go very close to character perception and sometimes stay quite distant.
Guides for voice usually focus on diction and syntax as the main avenues to achieving voice, and it’s certainly true that messing with diction and syntax will get you some unique voice. But the true source of strong voice comes from a different source.
Do you take us to a point of conflict and then, rather than allow us to see it play out and get all worried about the outcome, you summarize it or just resolve it quickly? Stretching tension means you lengthen the scene but also make it more gripping. Don’t push the action off-stage or rush through it. Linger on the most tense moments of the story to maximize engagement.