Category: Writing
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How to make scenes work harder, part II
For a story to succeed, the individual scenes need to work hard. Here are some tools I use to achieve that goal.
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How to make scenes work harder, part I
For a story to succeed, the individual scenes need to work hard. What does that mean and how can you know whether your scenes are working hard enough?
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Show some spine: the problem with Black Mirror “Bête Noire”
The Black Mirror episode “Bête Noire” has a broken spine. What do I meant by this and how might it have been fixed? Let’s dig in!
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Jules Verne imagined a better future, but not what made it worth imagining
Not having read Jules Verne, I’d hoped to be delighted by an early science fiction “master”. What I found was pretty appalling.
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How to make the inevitable surprising
Do your characters have a destiny? Or do they make choices? This post discusses how both can be true.
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How to create subscenes in Scrivener
How to configure a Scrivener project to build scenes from subscenes. And just what is a scene anyway?
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Naturalistic fantasy: a light touch for weighty tales
My work-in-progress novel, A Philosophy of Air, fits into the sub-genre naturalistic fantasy, which does not yet exist. I’ll define this sub-genre and why I think it’s an area ripe for new stories.
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Crossing the chasm: a leap of faith with your audience
Stories are innately more enjoyable when you trust your audience to cross a mental chasm: to draw the connections without being instructed on how to do so.
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Stuck: how to break free when your story snags
When your story gets stuck, try using the most basic of tricks to get unstuck: return to the fundamentals of the Process-Oriented approach.
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Pump up contrast! Stories (and people) love variety
Stories are not (necessarily) about “big” scenes. Instead, write scenes that work hard to tell your story and organize them for maximum contrast.