Tag: Tone

An Experiment in Writing – Part 10: ACTION SCENES! (finally)

Okay, you’ve all been waiting for this one…

Or at least I’ve been promising it for a while…

Pretty much everything covered here is in Writing Realistic Hand-to-Hand Combat Scenes.

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Pick up a copy of The Augmented Man and follow along.

For that matter, pick up multiple copies of any and/or all of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, and I need the money.

An Experiment in Writing – Part 9: Final Conflicts Worth Reading

A little more on closings.

Or near closings because the final conflict between protagonist and antagonist should come as close to the end of the story as possible…unless there’s another antagonist waiting for a few rounds with the champ.

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Pick up a copy of Empty Sky and/or any and/or all of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, and I need the money.

An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I

We left off in An Example of the Experiments – Fains I with a rewrite of the first paragraph, which was much better craftwise than the original and still sucked.

It was better than the original because of the solid POV, the protagonist’s situation was clearly stated, the setting and tone were much stronger, more character roles were defined, …

And still it sucked, and I knew it sucked, hence I wrote “Still needs work, though.” at the end of the post.

The real problem was I didn’t know how to fix it because I wasn’t sure of the specifics of what wasn’t working.

Much of the answer came while I worked on An Experiment in Writing – Part 8: Worthy Antagonists when I talked about developing a character’s backstory, about why the character behaves, thinks, responds, interacts, does as they do.

Give the reader only as much character background as necessary for them to understand the story.

 
Let me give you a caveat at this point: Give the reader only as much character background as necessary for them to understand the story.

Empty Sky’s Earl Pangiosi, The Inheritors’s Seth Van Gelder, look at any of the main and primary characters in my work and you’ll find lots of their background woven into the story.

It seems I do this weaving well because readers constantly comment on how real and vivid my characters are.

Back to Fains I (or “Eye.” I’m still deciding).
Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I“

An Example of the Experiments – Fains I

Sometime in the mid- to late-1970s, my third time through college (and still having no luck with traditional education of the time), I sat in my study in a rented house on Willand Pond Road and flipped through my copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (the centenary edition revised by Ivor H. Evans). I wasn’t looking for anything in particular except to be distracted from exceedingly boring classwork.

I found it on pg 409: “Fains I.”

“Fains I” is “a schoolchildren’s term of unknown origin exempting the first to call: ‘Fains I goal-keeping.'”

Dig a little deeper and it’s used to offer protection for someone asserting an unprovable claim.

Dig lots deeper and there’s a reference to “Hercules’ Shirt,” meaning his wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion which was impervious to all but the most powerful weapons (can you say “arms race”?)

That prompted an ~2k word story which is now, thankfully, lost to antiquity.

BTW, that deepest reference is lost except in certain modern retellings of the Hercules legend (such as Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules) in which much of Hercules’ legend is called into question.

Yeah, okay, great.

What’s this got to do with the Experiments (in Writing)?

I mention in An Experiment in Writing – Part 7: Inciting Incidents that my current #work-in-progress is Fains I and that the opening sucks.

Well, of course it does.

And it’s fixable.

I’ve spent considerable neural horsepower over the past few weeks coming up with ways to a) make it better craft-wise and b) make it a better story, period (storytelling).

Some of the solutions point to the (currently 3,425 word) story becoming a novel.

I really don’t want to write another novel right now.

Okay, okay, okay.

What I can do is use Fain’s I as an example of some of the things I bring up in the Experiments in Writing.

Which we’ll begin now, with Fain’s I’s opening paragraph (anybody remember So I gave myself an exercise (eating my own dogfood)…? That’s what we’re going to do here for the next several weeks (or however long it takes for me to decide the story’s working and publishable).
Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments – Fains I“

An Experiment in Writing – Part 4: More on Closings

Picking up from where we left off in An Experiment in Writing – Part 3: More on Openings, Closings, we’re going a little more into closings.

Just so we’re all clear on this, these Experiments in Writing posts are more for me. I hope you get something from them, yes, and I’m using them more to learn where I need work, to discover what I don’t yet understand fully if at all, and to keep myself improving.

I’m really doing these for myself, solipsist that I am…

And now, more on closings…

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Pick up a copy of Empty Sky and/or The Augmented Man, the books I reference in this post (should you not already have them (shame on you!)) and want to follow along.

FYI, future Experiments in Writing will cover

  • Exposition via dialogue
  • Action scenes
  • Language/word choice
  • Exposition
  • and a whole lot more…if I even get to them.