Emotions, difficult things they are in real life and in fiction. I was reading one of my trilogy books and realized I could add a lot more impact. It was a scene where a character realizes that his brother has betrayed his family, but also that a beloved daughter is not dead, and that the […]
Thoughts About Emotions in Fiction Read More »
A friend and I were emailing about characters in our fiction. I commented that I have a test for characters in my stories: Does each significant character have a humanizing internal non-defining characteristic that has nothing to do with the plot?I apply that to everything from short stories to novels. For the longer works like
Some time ago I was given a URL for an interesting web site: Hacker Factor Gender Guesser. It purports to use text to determine the gender of the author, and while I have no idea what the general validity of the method or how independent it is of things like education levels, socio-economic classes, religious
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Just saw Roman Holiday, the original version with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. I’ve seen it before, more than once, but not since I started writing. By modern movie standards it is considered cheesy and dated, and the story idea has been used so much since that it has become a cliche. However, you can’t
Now That’s Good Acting and Good Storytelling Read More »
This isn’t so much about writing fiction (or perhaps it was fiction) as something that caught my attention. I have long been a proponent of truth in advertising. I was watching Cash Cab when an advert came on for a dating site. One of their claims was that people who used the site were three
Truth in Advertising Read More »
This reflects my opinions. Having just been to When Words Collide, I have been editing my novel The Tower of the Ancients, cutting unnecessary words, phrases and sentences. Adverbs are, these days, considered a sign of bad writing. Same for adjectives, although not to the same degree. However, I defend the value of adjectives in
Filler words and useless phrases in writing Read More »
Note: This was written in 2014. I have since converted to using Scrivener. Last week a friend mentioned that she’d heard the scrivener software praised in a writer’s workshop. For anyone who doesn’t know, it is software that helps a writer organize, plan, and ultimately write their work whether it is fiction, a paper, an
Software to Use When Writing Read More »
