Tag: Atmosphere

Foreshadowing

I recently reread John Crowley’s Beasts and am reading James Dickey’s Deliverance and am recognizing something I’ve known for a long time and today, for some reason, is being hammered into me – Foreshadowing.

Adjective: foreshadowing
1. Indistinctly prophetic
Noun: foreshadowing
1. The act of providing vague advance indications; representing beforehand
Verb: foreshadow
1. Be a sign of something to come, esp. something important or bad

Foreshadowing is something I ususally recognize after the fact. Sometimes I’ve read something and am surprized by the climax/outcome, except I’m really not.

“…the story fails because you can’t completely, unexpectedly surprise a reader and expect to get away with it.

 
A story which completely surprises leaves me going WTF?. If I didn’t see something coming, if it happens totally out of nowhere, if there’s no precedent for it, if it’s not foreshadowed, the story fails because you can’t completely, unexpectedly surprise a reader and expect to get away with it. You’ve violated the promise you made when the reader agreed to sit down and read your work.

However, a story which surprises me, even causes me to say, “I didn’t see that coming,” but simultaneously satisfies me, that’s different.

I’ve often said and written one of my joys when talking with my readers is their sharing how my story resolutions catch them by surprise, but when they think about it, everything was foreshadowed somehow.

Regular readers know my style, voice, and technique well enough to notice when something is foreshadowed. They don’t know what it is, but do recognize a particular phrase points to something.

Reading Deliverance and knowing the outcome, I’m quickly recognizing a different kind of foreshadowing and something I will practice – now that I recognize it – because I believe it’ll take my writing to the next level.

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Great Opening Lines – and Why! (October 2022’s Great Opening Lines)

I wrote in Great Opening Lines – and Why! (Part 3 – Some Great Opening Lines) that I’d share more great opening lines as I found them.

My last entry in this category was July 2022’s Great Opening Lines – and Why! (May 2022’s Great Opening Lines) which covered Binah Shah’s Before She Sleeps. This entry in the Great Opening Lines – And Why! posts is Laura Koerber‘s Coyote’s Road Trip.
Continue reading “Great Opening Lines – and Why! (October 2022’s Great Opening Lines)”

Great Opening Lines – and Why! (July 2022’s Great Opening Lines)

I wrote in Great Opening Lines – and Why! (Part 3 – Some Great Opening Lines) that I’d share more great opening lines as I found them.

My last entry in this category was May 2022’s Great Opening Lines – and Why! (May 2022’s Great Opening Lines) which covered James Tiptree, Jr.’s The Milk of Paradise in the Harlan Ellison edited “Again, Dangerous Visions”. This entry in the Great Opening Lines – And Why! posts is Bina Shah‘s Before She Sleeps.

Before getting to the great opening line itself, some notes on the book as a whole.

I started this book before the US Supreme Court demonstrated that great legal minds can also be idiots. That demonstration occurred half way through my read.

Before, I thought the book brilliant and profound. After, even more so.

Before She Sleeps is rich with some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever encountered. Often reading beautiful phrasing can throw one out of a book because the phrase stops the reader so they can savor the author’s eloquence.

Not so here. The language is universally rich, so much so that the over-the-top brilliant passages merely hurried me along to read more.

I will offer the book ended too abruptly for me. I can accept the ending as written, everything is tied up, no loose ends, and I would have preferred it to linger a bit longer so I could bid the characters a better farewell for the joy they gave me.

Now to that great opening line.
Continue reading “Great Opening Lines – and Why! (July 2022’s Great Opening Lines)”

Toing and Froing Again, Part 2

This is the second post regarding teaching myself to recognize Toing and Froing when I commit it (a most heinous act done by inept writers on hopeless prose, poetry (it’d be tough but I’m sure it can be done), scriptwriting, playwriting, (possibly) non-fiction, creative non-fiction, …).

And remember, folks, I’m including myself in the above. I’m writing this Toing and Froing arc to teach myself better writing techniques because I Toed and Froed like a marathon runner who’d lost their bearings while writing The Alibi chapter 3 (of my current work in progress which I’ll start posting in August 2022).

Toing and Froing occurs when the writer/author has their characters move around or do things for no real story purpose; there’s no character development, no character revelation, the atmosphere doesn’t change, no plot elements are furthered or revealed, the movement is irrelevant to any established or impending plot points, the movement is unnecessary to the dialogue, et cetera.

Toing and Froing Again, Part 1 ended with “My writing speed slows down,” meaning I’ve lost my rhythm, and I pick up from there…
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Them Doore Girls – Narration

Tim Curry invited me to take part in a Hallowe’en podcast with several other authors, each of us reading something we felt fit the season.

Hallowe’en is celebratory to me and mine, and I didn’t think that’s what Tim had in mind.

I have written horror, though.

No, not written horribly (okay, maybe, and I’m getting better (I hope)), and not quite of horrible things (although some of my work is dark, I’ll grant you), so that set me off on a search.

I came up with two things. The first, shared last week, is a concatenation of two chapters in The Shaman, each of which deals with a succubatic kind of creature, Ellewomen. That post is, strangely enough, entitled “The Ellewomen.”

This one, Them Doore Girls, is from a horror story first published in Haunts 1992 and again in my self-published Tales Told Round Celestial Campfires 2016.

FYI, the sound quality is wanting. I find it best through headphones.

Enjoy!

Greetings! I’m your friendly, neighborhood Threshold Guardian. This is a protected post. Protected posts in the My Work, Marketing, and StoryCrafting categories require a subscription (starting at 1$US/month) to access. Protected posts outside those categories require a General (free) membership.
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