Posts by Chris Sunami
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
In general, I would go with the minimum number of main characters you need. As a reader, it's difficult and distancing for me to keep track of many characters, and hard for me to care. I'm willin...
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...
Writing is not real life. It is words on a page arranged to produce an effect, express a truth, or meet any of the many other possible goals of writing. So neither the non-naturalistic eloquence ...
You can and should answer these prompts in your own style and voice. I do have my doubts and concerns about these kinds of tests, but if there is any legitimacy to the grading at all, it won't be ...
From experience, just hitting a pop-culture trend head-on isn't necessarily going to make people read your book. Keep in mind, when a trend is hitting, there's plenty of competition. The people w...
As you've described it, successful writing, for you, has three phases. The first is a discovery phase, where you just write. The second is a clarification phase, where you discover your theme, an...
Many of the most famous songwriters have either done just lyrics or just music. It's relatively common to excel only at one or the other. Personally, I write both but I tend to prefer only doing ...
The thing you're seeking to avoid is creating a character who is nothing but an inverted collection of stereotypes. That's arguably better than just relying on the original stereotypes, but not ...
