writing techniques tagged posts

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This post begins a series on narrative and dialog. Stated most simply, narrative and dialog are the tools writers use to tell their stories. They take different forms and serve complementary functions, but with plenty of overlap.

Writers use narrative to:

• Describe—to show—action (“Bob ran down the street after Alice’s car”) or emotion;
• Describe a person (“Alice’s hair was dyed souvenir-shop-coral red”), a place, or a thing;
• Make connections between people, places, actions, emotions, or things; and
• Provide the reader with whatever other information she might need.

It is the words not placed inside quotation marks or used for internal monolog (sometimes shown in italics).

While it’s true that dialog can do many of these...

If you look up “tangent” in the dictionary, it takes a while to get to a definition like this one from Webster’s Universal College Dictionary: “digressing suddenly from one course of action or thought and turning to another.”

Tangents share a characteristic with excessive backstory and flashbacks: they start from the current story moment and then shift in time, place, point of view, or topic. As with a flashback, the author may mean to provide some kind of amplifying information, but then he forgets to stop after providing it and wanders not only off the beaten path, but off any path at all.

Sometimes that can be intentional, for example if she’s trying to produce a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing...

Backstory and its kissing cousin flashback are techniques authors use to provide amplifying information about a situation, a location, or a character. Flashbacks and backstory differ from “front story” in that the author jumps away from the story’s current timeline to relate them, then returns to the story’s present to continue.

Jumping forward in time—a “flash forward”—can have the same purpose, and everything below also applies to it.

Good Backstory Technique

Flashing back is just a technique for relating backstory. A brief interruption of the story’s flow, it can be:

• Initiated by the narrator to provide information not available to the characters or which would be unnatural for the characters to provide;
• A chara...

This article begins a series on flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory: that ancillary material that fills out a story and its characters by introducing information that doesn’t fit into the piece’s main flow. As with so many of the other subjects I’ve discussed, this topic applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

Before I get to flashbacks, etc., though, I need a transition: this post on transitions.

What Is A Transition?

A transition is a bridge, a connection between two pieces of a story, such as when the story changes:

• Time, that is, moves into the future or past relative to the current moment;
• Location;
• Point-of-view or focus character, in other words, whose perspective the story is being told through ...

We may not think of reading a work out loud as being a useful technique for critiquing a work, but it can be. Before a piece ever reaches a critiquer’s hands, though, authors can use the technique too. This article, then, is more for authors than critiquers, but both can benefit from it.

If you’ve been writing for any time at all, you’ve heard the advice that you should read your work out loud, or have it read to you. The reason is, you’ll hear things go bump or clank in the text that you might not have discovered otherwise. Your brain processes information through different channels when it comes in through your ears as opposed to when it comes in through your eyes. That can be truly eye- (or should that be “ear-”?) opening.

Like a lot of authors, I used to think I ...

I was originally going to title this article “Confused Timeline” but as I put my notes together I realized time isn’t the problem (other than me not having enough of it). Of course it’s important that a story flow in a logical sequence of events from its beginning to its end (with some exceptions I’ll get to in a moment), but that sequence doesn’t have to follow a time-linear order.

In fact, more than likely, it won’t. Consider:

• If there’s even one flashback, flash-forward, or instance of a character remembering something, the perfect time sequence is broken. This is true even if the story is written in the present tense.
• Same thing if there are multiple plot lines or point of view characters...

In a way it’s hard to say that a story’s plot is overly complex. Many stories have multiple plot lines, each with their own subplots, and yet the story “works”: the reader can understand what’s going on, the plot lines all make sense (eventually, anyway), and things come together at the end. Maybe the conclusion doesn’t tie everything together in a pretty bow—if the book is part of a series, it shouldn’t unless it’s the last one—but the story doesn’t end in a Gordian knot, either.

So the question isn’t whether a story’s plot is too complex, but whether it’s too complex for the space allotted to it...

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...