This is the first of a 3-part series on critiquing a story’s plot.

The basic concept of plot is simple: it’s the series of events that the characters experience and are involved in that builds in intensity, leading to the story’s climax and resolution. Every story—fiction or non-fiction—has one. In a so-called “literary” story, most of the “action” may be internal to the characters (emotional and/or psychological) rather than external. It may seem like there isn’t much plot, but there has to be some. At the other extreme, pick up any Tom Clancy novel and there’s tons of external activity—chases, explosions, spycraft, you name it—as well as internal action.

The point of this post isn’t to examine...

The flip side of providing vague or insufficient setting detail is providing too much. Drowning the reader in the minutia of a setting not only kills the momentum of the story, it causes readers to lose track of the story. When they do that, they lose interest. For the lucky author, the reader will just skip ahead—a few times.

Brace Yourself

But for the unlucky author, or the one who insists on writing a description like this—deep breath—“the three green sateen ribbons on the head of the second Pekinese from the left, the one with the ghost-grey patch of fur on its back that looks just like a giraffe if you look at it from the right rear, which is hard to do because the dog insists on spinning around—always clockwise,...

Last time I wrote about authors not providing setting information at all, or not providing it soon enough. Not providing enough detail about the setting is a similar problem. Next time we’ll go to the other extreme and discuss providing too much information.

It’s easy for an author to fall into the vagueness trap: after all, his mind’s eye sees the setting the characters are in. That knowledge becomes so ingrained that he can forget the reader isn’t right there with him: she doesn’t see what he sees, know what he knows, etc. In the end, details get left out, even when they’re new and important, and the poor reader becomes a member of the Fugawi Tribe. (See Part 18 for an explanation of who they are.)

Setting detail...

This is the first of three posts on setting.

Remember that old TV show, “Lost In Space”? Neither do I, really, but that’s OK. The title’s the important thing. I used to be in the Air Force, and there was a joke among us aviators that navigators were members of the Fugawi Tribe. (This was true for Naval aviators, too.)

“Why is that?” you ask.

“Because,” I reply, “you could often find them huddled over their paper charts [this was back in the day—today they huddle over GPS displays, mostly] with their compasses and protractors and special rulers and rotary slide rules...

Back in Part 9 I wrote about conflict. One form of conflict for characters is the obstacles they face: the things that keep them from achieving their goals. Obstacles come in many forms: physical objects, situations, people, animals, laws, psychological or emotional blockages, and more. Pretty much anything can be an obstacle given the right circumstances.

That, unfortunately, can be a problem as well as an opportunity.

The “Right” Obstacles

Authors have the opportunity to select the obstacles their characters will face. Pick the right ones and the story’s tension and conflict ratchet right up. Pick the wrong ones, though, and the reader is left scratching his head.

So what makes an obstacle “right?” H...

A story’s characters have—or should have—a variety of wants, needs, desires, and longings. Those words may seem to be similar, but the shades of difference between them are important.  Goals—things a character hopes, intends, or needs to achieve or accomplish—make those wants, needs, desires, and longings real. In a romance, the heroine has a goal to catch that special man; in a spy thriller, the spy has a goal to do his job without getting caught; in a literary novel, the protagonist may have a goal of reaching an understanding of a long-ago relationship gone bad.

Levels of Goals

In his excellent book Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham writes about characters having goals at the story, chapter, and even scene level...

In Part 9, I wrote about timing as it related to conflict. But there’s another layer of the writing onion that I need to discuss: timing as it relates to revealing character. I have a feeling this is one of those things that many writers, especially new ones and “pantsers” (writers who don’t plan out their stories in advance, but instead write “by the seat of their pants”), don’t think about. I admit I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t be surprised if experienced writers, whether they outline, stitch together scenes written in random order, or pants-it, do this more subconsciously than consciously, no matter what genre they write in.

Examining whe...

Major changes coming again to my Great Stuff posts. Starting next month, I’m going to again scale way back on these posts, for a lot of reasons:

• Technical buffoonery on my part that made the Twitter links back to them produce “page not found” errors that I didn’t know about (but should have). I know better now.
• Time. This is the main reason. It just takes too much time to produce these posts in the current form.
• Others are doing it better. They have bigger audiences. Another reason why my time isn’t being well spent on these posts.
• I need to rethink my social media involvement, such as it is.

So, July 1^st, when Google Reader dies, is a good time for a reevaluation and restructuring on these posts. What will that be? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here’s the Great Stuff for Writers from...

One of the key things readers want to see in a story (fiction or non-fiction) is some sign of change in the characters over the course of the story—positive, we hope, but that isn’t required. The protagonist may not get what he wants by the end, or even what he deserves, but he should grow or change in some way. The same is true for the secondary characters.

Even the antagonist needs to change. She doesn’t have to see the light, realize the error of her ways, and become the good person we always knew she could be, and that she always wanted to be deep down inside...

Quite a collection in today’s Great Stuff. There’s the Hero’s Journey, Niccolo Macchiavelli, who was probably not a hero, Aunt Edna, who might or might not have been one, and a cadaver or two. All in the service of writing. Plus foreign rights agents, dirty talk, and much more. Dive in!

CRAFT

Gregory Ciotti’s (@GregoryCiotti) Copyblogger post, What a Notorious 16^th-Century Philosopher Can Teach You About Content Marketing Today, might seem to have nothing to do with creative writing, given that its target market is the business blogger. That seeming would be wrong. Niccolo Macchiavelli’s The Prince was controversial, sure, and it’s the book he’s most remembered for, but what’s important to us short story and novel writers is how he used controversy to stir—and maintain—inte...