Activity for Dale Hartley Emery
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Is it bad storytelling to have things happen by complete chance? Most of the time, it's important that the outcome — good or bad — follow from the main character's actions. If the outcome is determined by chance or randomness or coincidence, it's less likely to feel satisfying. On the other hand, a certain amount of coincidence is fine if it complicates the main ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How to stop viewing your story as a film A key feature of written fiction is that we're not limited to two senses (sight and sound) the way film is. We writers can give the reader access to three additional senses, plus the internal experience of the viewpoint characters. So practice writing all five senses, and practice writing viewpoint ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Ways to avoid repetition of "filler" words in writing? I can see several possibilities here: 1. Don't worry about it. Perhaps your "overuse" of these words is simply part of your style. Or perhaps it isn't overuse at all. Ask a few good readers to read your story and give you feedback. 2. Make a list of the words you're concerned about. After you finis... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Have a tough time figuring out third-person prose Pick three or four third person scenes that you like from other writers. Type about 500 words of each into your word processor, using whatever format you normally use for manuscripts. As you type (and afterward) notice the rhythms those authors use, and how they make it clear whether the character i... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Chapters - Writing Order I don't know a lot of writers who write out of order. But Kristine Kathryn Rusch does, and her writing is awesome wins lots of awards in multiple genres. You will likely need some skill at gluing the pieces together, whether by writing short transitions or by writing scenes and chapters to bridge th... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can I determine the public opinion of an author? I think there are two questions here. The first (the OSC one) is about the helpfulness of a given writer's advice on writing fiction. The second (the Paolini one), if I understand it right, is about the "goodness" of a given writer's fiction, and (I'm guessing) about the usefulness of examining their... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: First person POV "mom:" vs. "mother" The choice of "mom" or "mother" or some other word helps to characterize the narrator. They differ in formality, and perhaps other attributes. This offers an interesting opportunity: Your character's choice of words could indicate something about her mood or her attitude toward her mother at each pa... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Should I start writing even if I'm not sure how the story will end? Lots of writers start writing with no idea where it will go, much less how it will end. Dean Wesley Smith has a book about that, called Writing Into the Dark. On the other hand, I once heard Richard North Patterson claim that "Any mystery writer who starts without knowing the end is committing autho... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I know whether to revise or submit elsewhere? Editors often reject stories for reasons that have nothing to do with the “quality” of the story (whatever that might mean). A few weeks ago I watched seven editors select stories for anthologies. Each editor was buying stories for their own anthology. There were about 250 stories submitted by 40 wr... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: What to do with cliched metaphors? See if you can add a twist. One time Harlan Ellison wrote: > She looked like a million bucks. Realizing what a horrible cliche that was, he changed it: > She looked like a million bucks, tax free. For a lame example (that twists the cliche by adding another one): > It sometimes felt as if we spo... (more) |
— | almost 9 years ago |
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A: Using filler words like 'So', 'Anyway' In general (and in your question and example) it makes the text feel friendlier and more conversational. In some contexts, a more conversational tone can make your ideas less persuasive. Whether it works depends on who is reading, and why they're reading. The word "just" in your example has the eff... (more) |
— | almost 9 years ago |
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A: How rough should a rough draft be Placeholders. (I'm explicitly focusing on my own reaction on this first point, because what I'm saying is very much a matter of personal taste.) I shudder at the idea of leaving placeholders in a manuscript. That impulse means that I've lost contact with the story and with the character. I'm no long... (more) |
— | almost 9 years ago |
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A: How could collaborative writing in one world work? Partly it depends on whose idea of quality you want to enforce. If you want to enforce your own personal idea of quality, you will have to involve yourself personally in selecting writers and stories, or in editing the stories: - Invite only writers that you trust to write high quality stories. - Se... (more) |
— | almost 9 years ago |
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A: How do you effectively denote a non-"heading-ed" transition into a concluding section? A different bullet to consider biting: Remove all of the headings. That gives the conclusion equal standing with the other parts. Now all that's left (hah!) is to mark the transitions. (more) |
— | about 9 years ago |
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A: When to be specific and when to let context fill in the holes? These two examples make the scene more specific in a particular way: By adding modifiers. In these cases: By adding adverbial phrases. Your temptation to add the modifiers is telling you something. Some word elsewhere in your sentences may be too abstract. Your concern about adding words is telling... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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A: Defining a Prologue Usually a prologue is outside the main flow of the story in some way: - Tease with an out-of-sequence scene. The prologue might tease us by previewing a pivotal scene that will occur later in the main storyline. Often this is a snippet of the climax. - Give context through a different viewpoint. A p... (more) |
— | over 9 years ago |
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A: How should changing the point of view be handled? No matter what else you do, make sure you do this: Clearly distinguish the sidekick's personality from the main character's. Different attitudes. Different "voice," such as diction or accent or sentence structures. Different level of education. Different background. Different opinions about everythi... (more) |
— | almost 10 years ago |
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A: What are some strategies for surprising the reader? A common approach is to give the detail, but to disguise its significance. Mystery writers are masters of this. One trick is to insert the relevant detail in the middle of a long list. Readers tend to skim long lists. They read the first item and the second, and then skim to the last. So you can hid... (more) |
— | almost 10 years ago |
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A: Indicating a word choice you're unsure of When I'm writing, I simply mark the word for later review. How I mark it depends on my writing tool: highlight by changing the background or foreground color, insert a note or comment, wrap in [square brackets], some other way. (more) |
— | about 10 years ago |
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A: How to handle a character when she is lying about her name A few possibilities: - Tag Nicene with an utterly distinctive physical feature. When Shadow observes that physical feature, readers will know that it is Nicene. - Give Nicene some tag phrase, and have Cherry use the phrase. - Write an earlier scene in Nicene's POV, where she introduces herself to so... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Problem: Scenes that are unavoidable, but boring In addition to the always wise advice to omit the boring parts... - Summarize the boring parts in a short paragraph. Maybe simply refer to them in passing. - Complicate the terms of the negotiation until the negotiation becomes interesting. - Add conflicts or problems until the scene becomes interes... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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How to indicate emphasis in plain text manuscripts Some short story markets (e.g. Daily Science Fiction) request manuscripts in plain text. How do you indicate emphasis in a plain text manuscript? (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How can I avoid word repetition in the following paragraph? One simple, effective way to solve it: Stop editing. It's fine. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What are these extra phrases added to the beginning of sentences called? The term is metadiscourse, or communication about the communication. Sometimes they help guide the reader through a complex line of reasoning. Sometimes they add emphasis or rhythm. Sometimes they're just noise. "Use them liberally" (from your other post) seems like coarse advice, perhaps useful unt... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How to convey that the POV character *does not understand* what's said in dialogue? I would refine the advice thus: Translate the viewpoint character's experience into the language of the reader. That is, if the viewpoint character hears gibberish, you translate the experience of hearing gibberish into the reader's language. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: API reference doc: best practices for describing opaque parameters? Scan the documentation for the Ruby standard library, which includes numerous examples. I quickly scanned the some YAML parser classes, and the idea seems to be to simply describe how a method will use its parameters. In many cases, the use isn't described, and mostly I can guess the use from the nam... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How can I dig conflict out of an optimistic SF-nal premise? If your change solves a problem that previously had no solution, there are likely people who have a stake in preserving the problem. If your change solves a problem better than some previous solution, there are people who have a stake in the old solution. If your change opens up new possibilities f... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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What factors in fiction arouse readers' expectations? Feedback from my writer's group tells me that my recent stories leave promises unfulfilled and important questions unanswered. So I've become interested in how stories make promises and raise questions. So I've identified a few factors that arouse readers' expectations. - Character desire. If I put... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: What do you do if you enjoy writing, but have no ideas? If you really don't care what you write, it's easy to come up with ideas. Lately this is all I need to get started: Character + setting + problem. This is from an old "seven-point plot outline" that Algis Budrys taught to a zillion writers you've heard of. Start by writing about some character in s... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: 1st person story, but the main character will die in the end and some of the story needs to be told after his death. How to solve this problem? I see two problems. First, if the person died, how did the story come to be set down in writing? This is a problem whether the story continues after the narrator's death or not. Some readers will accept this; others will not. The second problem is the use of only an epilogue. Readers often feel swin... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: avoiding making all your characters sound the same In addition to Lauren's list, here are a few things I do: - Give each character a distinct background. Some possible elements to vary are geography, culture, ethnicity, education, age, friends, family. Each of these can affect a character's vocabulary, grammar, and general attitude toward the people... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: Deciding whether to use a dialogue tag or an action tag in a dialogue When different phrasings all have more or less the same meaning, I choose the phrasing that creates the tone or mood I want. For that, I listen to the rhythm, tempo, and sounds. Reading the passage out loud, in context, is a big help here. Some of your phrasings give cues about the order of events. ... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: How do I successfully structure a long fiction piece? I have a hunch: The endings are not satisfying. When that's true, there's nothing for the second half of the novel to build toward. If that's true, then perhaps the problem is not structure per se, but the ending. And if that's true, there's a good chance that the beginning somehow doesn't lend itse... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: Book recommendations for writing better technical papers Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Williams and Colomb. This book more than any other helped me write with power and confidence. Also clarity and a modicum of grace. (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: What methods can I use to revise my writing? The technique that has been most useful to me is to begin each section, paragraph, and sentence with information that readers already know, and move new information to or toward the end. I learned the technique from Joseph M. Williams's terrific book Style, which is chock full of ideas about how wri... (more) |
— | about 13 years ago |
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A: Guideline on turning points in a novel? There are few guides specifically for novels, but there are numerous books about story structure for screenwriters: - The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. This is my favorite of the bunch. He describes 22 steps that successful movies often follow. The steps follow several interweaving arcs, including... (more) |
— | about 13 years ago |
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A: Meretricious - A bit too fancy? It depends who will use the word. If it's one character talking or thinking about another, it's a great word, and will help to characterize both characters in one swell foop. It will also trigger many readers to react in ways that enhance what you're trying to say. Readers who understand the word wil... (more) |
— | about 13 years ago |
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A: Critique: Intro/Prologue to my Novel-in-Progress I like the flow just the way it is. I don't see any inconsistencies in these few paragraphs. And I think there is plenty here to intrigue readers. Several stylistic choices tripped me up as I read. My first stumble was over modifiers. Consider replacing "swiftly walked" with a stronger verb. "Tragic... (more) |
— | about 13 years ago |
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