How do you make the fantastic elements of your stories seem real?

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In an effort to get through my first draft, I put a few worldbuilding projects on the backburner. And I’m glad I did.

One of those projects was to develop a calendar. Now that I’m in the editing phase, it needs done now. Or else making fixes during later revisions will be a pain.

I first mentioned the madcap idea of creating my own calendar for Five Rings and went into detail with the actual days of the week here. Read the rest of this entry »

A huge element of style is the point-of-view a writer is most likely to write in. Is everybody clear on exactly what ’3rd person limited’ is? If not, here’s a quick run-down of the POVs.

1st Person:

First person’s easy. Your second grade papers were most likely written in first-person.  And of course I’m writing in first person now. In a story, the writer assumes the main character’s (MC’s) viewpoint and writes only what s/he is thinking.

Avoid:
…making the main character psychic. The MC shouldn’t know what someone else is thinking, etc.

The advantage:
It’s immersive. The reader gets into the story by living in the main character’s head, experiencing exactly what s/he’s thinking and seeing.

The disadvantage:
If other characters split up and leave the MC, the writer might have the tough task of showing the reader what happened to those characters. It can be problematic. Should the writer have the characters catch up with the MC later and fill him in? Or  jump into another person’s head for awhile (This method can be used, but it’s jarring to the reader to adjust to a different character in first person)? Either way, it’s difficult to pull off.

2nd person:

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Welcome to part 3!
IMO, style is a fascinating topic. As I write, share, and critique more, it’s just as neat to watch other writers’ styles develop as it is to notice the subtle changes in my own.

I’d love to share with you what writing methods I’ve found myself leaning towards over the past year:

1. I often drop the word ‘that’.

I decided that I would go.

becomes:

I decided I would go.

But not always. I try to play a mix-up game when I write—I don’t always follow a rule. For variety’s sake.

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As I’ve been writing scenes and posting wordcounts, I’ve gotten away from something important: How did I come up with this stuff, anyway?
After all, wasn’t the whole point of this blog to share the creative writing process?

“Where is your story supposed to start, really?” is one of the toughest questions to answer. Some people try to oversimplify the answer.

Holly Lisle is one of those people. “Beginnings are endings,” she says. She believes that beginnings always present the protagonists with problems they are ill-equipped to handle. The ending should be just like the beginning, only the protagonists should’ve learned over the course of the story how to properly deal with those exact same problems. If that’s not the case, she suggests you might’ve started at the wrong place. Makes sense, right?

But I don’t buy it. My favorite stories usually raise the stakes until the protagonists are faced with much more difficult problems than they could’ve ever imagined at the beginning. Characters change. Emotionally, mentally, and physically.

While they’re travelling, the world around them shouldn’t stay static, either. It changes and grows.

Imagine a story where a boy, who gets kicked around by a bully, stumbles through a portal in his school locker to a magical land where he learns how to fight and stand up for himself. Then, when he returns back to his world all ready to kick some butt, it turns out the bully slipped on soap in the shower and died. lol. Read the rest of this entry »

The location page got a hefty update. The characters page got a minor one (I’m going to update that more, soon). Since I came up with a lot of those names on-the-fly, feedback is most definitely welcome. Especially if anything I named there also happens to be the name of a rare foot disease, or whatever.

Anyway, the next scene is when I start to coordinate the groups of characters I’ve introduced.

There’s traditional Shiirati music as a backdrop; heavy rhythmic drum beats echoing through the city due to the festivites.

There’s Cauinn—along with nearly the entire population of the city—at the Feast of the Eight. She still has Cirellio’s lock of hair and is waiting patiently for him.

There’s the guards patrolling every city street.

There’s Cirellio sneaking through the city.   Read the rest of this entry »

(Yay! This is my 60th post. We’re also on the threshold of 5,000 hits. What a milestone on both counts. Thanks, all! ^_^)

Before I get too much further with writing scenes, I’d like to talk a little bit more about plot structure.

The plot is an unruly beast. There are many theories as to why a story works, or how to combine various elements to make the “ultimate plot combination”. The number of possible plot types is hotly debated, but it’s a growing list. We’re not talking about some sacred list that only adds a new plot once every 1000 years; Something like sixteen more have been added just within the last 100 years. So don’t listen to those old codgers that claim ‘everything under the sun has been done’, just like how inventors in the past always managed to invent new things, despite their stuffy compatriots claiming everything under the sun had already been invented. You CAN write something new.

Anyway, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon what I feel is a cool trick to writing good plots. (If it’s widely known info, forgive me. It’s definitely not widely known at my on-line stomping grounds, nor is it mentioned in any of my ‘how-to’ reading materials.)

But before I talk about that, I want to reiterate something->
I’m sure you’ve all seen Syd Field’s three-act plot structure. But just in case you haven’t, here they are (in my own words): Read the rest of this entry »