Posts by Chris Sunami
All writing in print is (technically) telling. You can "show" in a movie or a play, but everything you're doing in a book is telling, if you want to get technical about it. A lot of times it is b...
It depends on what your goal is --an open letter can have many different audiences, and the putative addressee may not be the actual target. With that said, the best structure for a persuasive argu...
Don't introduce them all at once --that's not a story, that's a cast list. Bring them in one at a time, or in small groups, when needed by the storyline, and describe them in ways that illuminate ...
I've always struggled with sensory details in my writing --I'm a dialog-and-plot kind of writer. But for me, writing details really came alive when I discovered your number three approach. When d...
This is not a problem, this is an opportunity. Great stories are written about insoluble moral conflicts. The fact that you've created one that you --and the reader --can't immediately and easily r...
The kinds of criticisms you are encountering are not aimed against the concept of the hero having a love interest. They are aimed against female characters that that exist only as a motivation for ...
Sometimes you'll see authors avoid constantly repeating character names by replacing them with descriptors. For instance (assume that all three descriptors are referring to John, the tall man who ...
I'm working on a novel that will have at least three distinct sections in three distinct locations (the two main characters start in the first location, travel through the second location, and one ...
For many years --decades actually --my goal with every piece of writing I wrote was that it be read and appreciated by someone. There were plenty of things I wrote that didn't achieve that goal, an...
Current practice for attention-calling literary elements --I'm thinking primarily here of things like accents and dialects --is to start out with enough to give the flavor, and then to assume that ...
Realism is just a style --you're trying to give readers the feel and the flavor of this character, not give them an exact transcription of what his actual thoughts would be. That gives you several...
I've seen this done several different ways. Chorus in bold (typical in printed lyrics to be sung from if everyone, including the lead, sings that part together) It was in nineteen hundred an...
The superficial problem is whether the readers will care about this character, but the deeper problem is YOU don't care about him. You even describe him as "it" --there's no emotional investment h...
What about using synecdoche (a part for the whole)? Doctor X was a polymath, who invented the Y medical procedure and composed the epic opera Z. He was just one of the 300 people, representi...
Readers typically prefer active characters, because one of the reasons we read is to learn, and one of the ways we learn is by seeing the decisions that characters make, and their consequences, dra...
Your girlfriend is correct that the bad guy winning at the end limits your audience, and will anger some readers. But it's important that you write your own book, not the book you think you should ...
Most people don't constantly think about their own appearance, which can make first person appearance describing a little awkward. But there are some legitimate times we do think a lot about how w...
CON: The reasons to not write something you wouldn't read are pretty easy and straightforward: You are a stand-in for your potential audience. If even you aren't interested in this idea, that au...
I've always been a "prisoner of inspiration," but I've at long last come to understand/accept that there are technical, skill-based things that you can do to create those perfect scenes --you don't...
Genre should be seen largely as a way of connecting a writer with the audience most likely to enjoy his or her book based on elements shared with other books. It isn't an exact science, and for th...
Stripped of all the self-aware, meta jargon, the problem is that your hero isn't well suited to a big, action-packed showdown --she's more likely to win with her wits than her fists. Given that, I...
First, thank you for asking this question. All too often, I encounter things in the media where I desperately wish people had asked questions like this beforehand. It can be especially painful in...
I think your instincts are correct. This structure isn't going to work as is. But that doesn't mean you can't build a great novel out of these pieces. I'd suggest one of three paths: 1) Drop th...
I recently decided to make a long delayed return to a genre where I had early publishing success, upper-level picture books. Given that I now have school-aged children, I have a number of stories ...
This is also my problem. The trick to solving it is to understand WHY description is necessary. You're not just checking a box or jumping through a hoop. Description puts the reader inside the p...
