Place and Time

Otherwise known as Setting. It's one of the [many] things I struggle with. The basics of an opening to a story needs to make clear the Who is Where and When, Why they're there (maybe just a hint), and What they're doing. This post is about the Where and When of a story. The place …

Summary Tell, or Interactive Show?

It's that old conundrum of show versus tell. Every story has summary, every story has immediacy, but they don't usually end up in the same paragraph. There are reasons for that. A tell is summarising something, a conclusion made, or an unmoving description (static, unattached to a character). There are several ways to tell. Summarising …

And Then There was the … Synopsis

What -- you do it first? I don't, and there's a reason for that. It's not that I do things back to front, at least not from my perspective. The start is the beat sheets, one for each character in the story, but the main two characters (usually the main character/protagonist and the antagonist) get …

Chit, Chat without Context

The writerly term is talking heads syndrome. What does it mean? Dialogue happens, but there's nothing there, no sense of the where for setting, nor grounding of context or situation. Dialogue can be great, but if there's no world setting, no place for it to happen, the mouthpieces can be set on a piece of …

What’s a Plot?

For all of us, eventually, it's where we go after 'the end' but that's not the plot I want to talk about here. Plot in a story is about the events that lead from one to the next until 'the end' for the snippet of this [main] character's life. If the events don't lead from …

Four Times, Yes

For the last few weeks, this is what you've been getting. You get it because I've been chopped up (shoulder surgery) and then put back together (I hope) and need some time to heal and get mobility back on board. It's a slow process, especially with both shoulders now on the road. So, in the …

Older Persons Day?

It is. Or it was. 1 October 2020. Yes, yesterday. I forgot. It happens. I'm old enough to not worry about the little things. And what is the theme for this lovely little international day for oldies? The decade of Healthy Ageing (I always have to look up whether to put that 'e' in there), …

A Content Warning

from Pixabay Recently, I've seen a few of these on books. They're usually associated with the same types of warnings on movies and TV. Contains violence, rape, incest, etc. Sometimes, they give a minimum age requirement. Most are in the genres of crime, horror, psychological-based thrillers with gruesome criminal acts. I write mainly in dark …

Equinox, Spring

Or Autumn in the north (or Fall?). The days and nights are equal, the light even with the dark, the seasons calmer, cooler, preparing for the long haul. For us, the heat will be over the next hill, and it's not a very high lump. We'll be hot for much longer than we were cool …

Butterfly, Wanderer

This comes from the conjunction of two things: Thursday Inspiration and the newest story, so I'll reconcile with Fandango as well and show you some of the interior of The Novitiate. Yes, it's a new title. And only a tiny bit of an excerpt. ... The signs and sigils on the circle aligned the groups, …