Ruth-Lund

THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO SIT THERE SHOULD BE THE ARTIST AND THEN IT SHOULD GO BE IN A MUSEUM.

So. You’ve got a story. You’ve been hard at work writing it/planning it, when suddenly, you hit a block. You don’t know what to add next in your story. 

Now what?

Don’t worry - I am here to help give you some ways to come up with that juicy new content.

1) Think through your story when you’re relaxed.

There’s a reason we get all of our best ideas when we’re driving home from work/school, or just about to fall asleep, or in a shower. It’s because, usually, we’re pretty relaxed. When that happens, your brain decides it’s got permission to explore, since it’s not actively trying to keep you from getting eaten by tigers or whatever analogy people use to talk about modern-day stress responses.

Pretty much, find a way to relax. Then think through aspects of your story surrounding the content gap. What might need to happen in order to bridge that gap? The best part about this method is that it’s surprisingly effective - so long as you’re actively thinking about your story - and you also get to practice some self care at the same time. So for all you folks who feel guilty about taking care of yourself (please, please take care of yourself), here’s your workaround.

(This is a sort of medium-long post, so i’ve put the rest of the tips below the cut)

Something I’ve encountered ad nauseam over the last few projects I’ve edited is a relentless repetition of words, phrases, and ideas. One of the most frustrating and confidence-destroying issues a reader can encounter is poorly executed repetition, which can stem from different problems, including:

Too much reliance on your natural stock phrases.

Limited vocabulary.

Not proofreading close enough or editing thoroughly enough.

Lack of confidence.

Not writing with the reader in mind.

I want to preface this with the fact that obviously certain types of repetition aren’t bad. Repetition is an incredibly powerful tool when used effectively, and what’s effective is subjective per book and per reader. That’s a massive topic for another time. This post is specifically about egregious uses of repetition, the types that any good editor or beta reader will point out as in need of fixing.

Point being, if you do it right, when you pivot around your guard and bring the pommel around the blade, your wrist does come into contact with the edge, but there is no sliding motion, and it’s that sliding motion that causes a blade to slice. You pivot, pull against the blade, and it goes flying as your wrist pulls away from the edge.

As novelists and short story writers, we probably don’t think about scene transitions too much. Don’t get me wrong, we may take a long time seeking out the perfect hook or the most-intriguing opening, and we may write and rewrite the end of the scene to get it just right. But when it comes to moving from one scene to another … it’s probably something we feel more rather than really think about.

And that’s okay, and you can be totally successful that way.

But last year I learned about two scene transition techniques that have stuck with me. Unsurprisingly, they come from film, a medium where scene transitions are more obvious and more touchy.

Lately I’ve been more and more mindful of them in my writing and have found they can be quite helpful when trying to get the flow between passages just right.

They come from the book Story by Robert McKee.

In it, McKee explains that when it comes to successful scene transitions, you really have two options:

1 - Emphasize a likeness between the end of the last scene and the beginning of the next scene.

2 - Emphasize a difference between the end of the last scene and the beginning of the next scene. (aka, create contrast, as I like to say)

In reality, both of these approaches can be super helpful in other aspects of writing, but let’s stick to the subject today, which is scene transitions.

While the likeness and difference can be obvious, most of the time, it’s better that they are not too obvious, so they don’t draw undue attention to themselves.

McKee gives some great examples:

1 - A characterization trait. In common: Cut from a bratty child to a childish adult.  In opposition: Cut from awkward protagonist to elegant antagonist.

2 - An action. In common: From the beginning of lovemaking to savoring the afterglow. In opposition: from chatter to cold silence.

3 - An object. In common: From greenhouse interior to woodland exterior. In opposition: From the Congo to Antarctica

4 - A word. In common: A phrase repeated from scene to scene. In opposition: From compliment to curse.

5 - A quality of light. In common: From shadows at dawn to shade at sunset. In opposition: From blue to red.

6 - A sound. In common: From waves lapping a shore to the rise and fall of a sleeper’s breath. In opposition: From silk caressing skin to the grinding of gears.

7 - An idea. In common: From a child’s birth to an overture. In opposition: From a painter’s empty canvas to an old man dying.

Obviously these examples are aimed at film, but you could make them all work in a short story or a novel, should you want to.

Basically, these approaches help with flow.

They can also be great at smoothing over subjects and ideas that may be repeating.

Recently, I was working on two consecutive scenes, with two different sets of characters, and each touched on the subject of fasting (long story short, it relates to a magic system/worldbuilding thing I have going on). I was wondering how to address this without sounding repetitive, when Robert McKee’s advice came to mind.

I realized the best idea was to have scene “A” end with the viewpoint character breaking a fast and have scene “B” start with the viewpoint character’s stomach groaning.

Seems simple, but it solved my problem and helps the reader transition smoothly from one passage to the next. I also don’t have to circle around back to a subject I was already just addressing.

Obviously you don’t have to do this sort of thing every time, but they are helpful tricks for when you want to get that flow just right.

Ideally in the same sentence, or in one coming soon after, you plant in a great hook. And get the setup in. And get the character’s goals. And get the stakes … and, yeah, you get the idea (scene structure will be another day).

(You can download a free, printable Point of View Cheatsheet to go along with this post in my Free Resource Library! If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the login information. Or just keep reading!)

Point of View: An Introduction

Simply stated, point of view is the vantage point from which a story is told. But point of view is much more complicated than that. It encompasses everything from who the narrator is (the author? a character?) to what attitude they have about the story they’re telling.

When the point of view for a short story or novel has been thoughtfully constructed, it acts nearly invisibly. But lose your footing, even briefly, and the reader will immediately sense something is off. Even subtle inconsistencies in a story’s point of view can pull us out of the moment.

With the stakes so high, it’s important to make deliberate, thoughtful choices about point of view. Yet all too often, this show-stopping element of fiction writing takes a backseat to writers’ concerns about plot and character. But point of view isn’t an easy gimmick or a frivolous choice to be taken lightly. Point of view, when used correctly, is the story.

Let me repeat that. Point of view IS the story.

Say your novel is about a woman who murdered her husband. You could tell that story from the perspective of the woman, 20 years later, looking back regretfully on what happened… or from the perspective of a burned-out detective, during the investigation… or from the perspective of her dead husband, from the afterlife, as he watches his wife suffer in prison… or from the perspective of a deaf child who witnessed the crime, and is now traumatized for life…

But those aren’t just “different spins” on the same story. They are all completely different stories.

The infinite subtleties and endless possibilities of point of view are too much for a single blog post. But I’d like to share some point of view basics with you as a jumping off point.

Here’s a list of the five most common points of view, and how to decide which is right for you. I also made a free, printable Point of View Cheatsheet that you can download in my Free Resource Library. 🙂

The Five Basic Points of View

The five basic points of view are first person, second person, third person limited, third person omniscient, and multiple point view. Choosing between them can seem overwhelming at first, but you can simplify your decision by thinking of them as existing on a continuum between perspective and intimacy.

*tools for general use, but especially when you gotta get something fixed. AKA a thing I wish everyone had because problems become real obvious when you know what to look for.

Something about the prose is bothering me. Look for:

Tonal dissonance between individual words: think of it as words being colors. Tone=Color. The question is whether the colors match. Especially look at adjectives for colorful words, but verbs and adverbs tend to be strong in tone as well. You can use words that mean very different things together and the reader might not really notice so long as the tones match well enough. See, the character’s warm, effervescent personality makes more sense than their balmy, effervescent personality. It’s off even if you are down for atypical word usage. (One among many reasons writers dislike thesauruses.) 

Tonal dissonance between words, characters and readers: it’s important to keep in mind that when we talk about word “tone,” we mean emotion. The tone of warm is appealing and the tone of balmy is gross. Therefore, you have to make sure that the words you choose carry the same emotion you want your reader to feel. Most writers do that intuitively, so it’s a case of something being so obvious you forget to consider it. But as well as mood matching what your reader should feel, also be aware of how those adjectives represent what the character is feeling. If the character is pissed off and you go on about how “warm” the other character’s personality is, that’s dissonant.

Show-don’t-tell (otherwise termed “trust your audience”): Part of the fun of reading is filling in the blanks. Look for places where you might be over-explaining, places where you state something outright (especially if you do it more than once), and try to scale back. Sometimes you’ll find you can just delete the statement, because you implied it well enough elsewhere. This is possibly the most common piece of advice because over-telling is the quickest way to piss readers off.

And here’s a quick grab-back of common, easy to identify problems: tenses, repeated words (easiest to use search+replace function), active v.s. passive voice (just make sure it’s consistent for now), sentences all the same structure/length (try moving your subject around), and a problem with adverbs (assess the adverb and if it doesn’t add something new to the verb before it then it’s not useful).

I think it’s the characters?? Look for:

a small Texture Tutorial

I’ve been asked a few times about how I use textures, especially gold textures, so I’ve decided to try and do a little tutorial about it. I’ve never really done a tutorial, but I hope it’s easy to understand, since it’s not difficult to apply :)

There are a hundred ways of doing the same thing, this is just one of those ways. For other (BETTER) tutorials explaining more about textures and other ways to use them, I point you all towards the 3 tutorials that taught ME the basics!

TUTORIAL: how to use textures by agosbeatle

TUTORIAL: Applying texture by Shinerai

Doesn’t look like a limerick to you? Try this:

A dozen, a gross, and a score Plus three times the square root of four Divided by seven Plus five times eleven Is nine squared and not a bit more.

Wandered into an article with 140 iconic cinematic shots, the comments complained there was no explanation to their composition. Decided to give it a run down and keep it to myself.