I’m working on a series on pacing. You can see other posts in the series here. … Dear engineer types, I am a poet type. So I’m borrowing the metaphor from my spouse, who works in IT and does woodworking. Let’s agree to look at pacing as a woodworking project. We start with our raw […]
I’m working on a series on pacing. You can see other posts in the series here. … I’ll get to pacing for engineers in a bit. First the different building blocks of pacing: Word length. Length of phrases (as marked by breaths or punctuation). Sentence length. Paragraph length. Beat length (the length of each individual
Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean and Blackadder fame did a comedy/documentary series called Funny Business or Laughing Matters in 1992. The first episode, on physical comedy, is available online. Not only is this a great lesson on physical comedy, but on breaking down and distorting character–and why. … It takes writing time to write these posts. If you enjoyed
I’m going to give two explanations of what pacing is, one for poet-types and one for engineer-types. This is an arbitrary split, and you’ll probably need both perspectives at some point. For poets: Pacing is how you start sneaking poetry into fiction, without the heightened sense of language that might tip your hand to the
At some point, the beginning writer starts to notice that different stories are different from each other. They don’t all seem to follow the same rules. For a while (and I’ve seen this a lot), the writer tries to stretch “their” system of writing to fit the basics to cover all possible variations. This is where
When writers first start out, what they’re mainly aware of, writing-wise, is conflict. This is when you sit down and start writing a scene and go, “This is two people fighting about something, how exciting!” Let’s call that Level 0. Beginning writers have started to be inundated with English classes; they often have a set
Pacing, Part 1: Welcome to Intermediate Writing! Read More »
If epic fantasy is often about coming of age… In order to do/get the thing, the character has to pretend to be someone they’re not. Sometimes that character isn’t willing to do so, and gets beaten down until they must fulfill that role. Either they discover they’re not really faking it, OR they discover that no,
Simple Epic Fantasy Plots, Part 4: Imposter Syndrome Read More »
Okay, grimdark seems to love this plot like I love butter. The thing must be accomplished at all costs, because reasons. Hahahaha, reason. Using methods the character never would have considered at the outset (and they considered more than a few things), the thing is accomplished! And now they don’t want it, because the cost
The characters have to do the thing. Just one tiny little thing. Uh-oh. Remember the last time we had to do just a tiny little thing? It didn’t go well. The characters have to do the thing, which is usually identified as being super-easy. (Usually, there’s more than one character, although one of them is
As far as I can tell, there are three main areas of contemporary fantasy that are so separated from each other that it’s pointless to try to lump them together. Epic/high fantasy. Urban fantasy. Everything else. Tropes and fans can and do cross over, but trying to figure out what’s going on seems to require
Simple Epic Fantasy Plots, Part 1: Danger Behind Us Read More »
