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Celestial Navigation by Marcus Sakey |
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 Writing is a strange business, a dealing in constant abstraction, invention by sheer force of will. It's not always easy to see where you're going, or how to get there. So when you manage to discover a trick that makes the process simpler, it's like the stars broke free of the clouds.
This is a running list of techniques I use to navigate. I hope one of them might help if you're lost. • Spend at least as much time worrying about the characters as the plot. Get to know them. Figure out their conflict with one another. Plot and character evolve in tandem. • Know your villain as well as you know your hero. And remember that everyone is a hero in their own story. Make them act accordingly and they'll be a lot scarier. |
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Writers, The End is Near: Four Ways to End a Short Story by Edward G. Talbot |
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"This is the end. My only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end"
- from "The End" by The Doors, 1967
 In my humble opinion, that song is one of the truly great rock songs. The mixture of pleasure and pain it describes applies to more than just lost love and killers and death. Sometimes when we writers are working on a story, finishing the story can be bittersweet, or even just plain bitter. And sometimes we get near the end and we have no idea how to finish it, especially with a short story. In this post, I've outlined four possible ways to effectively end a short story.
There are more ways to end a story other than these four of course. And there is often overlap between the different ways. But if you are stuck, a look at these may help unstick you. Even if you aren't stuck, they may give you some ideas. Anyway, here they are: |
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Making the Average Joe Unaverage by Rebbie Macintyre |
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My experience with Backspace was exceptional, and even as a published author, I learned and re-learned so many writing principles. One of the highlights of the conference was a mini-workshop by the master teacher of fiction writing, Donald Maass.
 Maass talked about the opening of a novel, how it must be exceptionally crafted, maximizing the writer's skills. He started out by asking how many of us were writing about "average people caught in extraordinary circumstances." Quite a few hands went up, including my own. He explained that was one of the three types of protagonists. (The other two types are the heroic character and the dark character. I'll talk about Maass' insights for those characters in the following posts.) |
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