Interruption: interrupting your tidily paced scenes, cutting off leisurely exploration with an urgent message, having something happen earlier than planned, can improve pacing and tension.
Contamination: letting a subtle significance slowly creep into your scenes from the edges, for the reader to gradually become aware of.
#wonderbook
“Once you have dramatized a particular type of act or action more than once – sometimes as little as two or three times – it begins to give diminished returns to the reader, especially if presented back-to-back…. This repetition may mean that entire scenes become “invisible” to the reader; they no longer stimulate the reader’s interest or excitement.”
#wonderbook
Beats are the back-and-forth, action-and reaction, cause-and-effect elements of fiction. Progressions are beats arranged in a way that flows and creates intensity, revelation, and the sense of rising action. Carry through on the wider consequences of your action to create energy and complexity within and across scenes.
Rule of thumb: you can drop every third beat of a fight scene and it will be quicker, but still make sense.
#wonderbook
From Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook:
A scene dramatizes at least one character in the moment – showing, not telling, or at least conveying to the reader the sense of being shown. The ratio of dialog and actions unfolding in the present to exposition, flashback, description and summary is actually very flexible.
A half scene is a mini scene consisting of a few lines of dialog and description, embedded into summary or a different scene to provide more depth and drama.
Summary or exposition describes action or thought without dramatizing it – tells rather than shows. You can get away with a surprising amount of this if you make it interesting enough.
#wonderbook
Originally shared by Mike Reeves-McMillan
So, would you be interested if I wrote a blog post series (leading to an ebook) on “The Well-Presented Manuscript: How to Stand Out When Submitting to Editors”?
It would mainly address the short story market (context: I’ve done a lot of short story submitting in the past year, have made several sales, and most of the rejections I’ve had have been personalised, which is a sign I’m getting past the slush readers). I have also been an editor in a major publishing house, though, and a lot of the advice would also apply to submitting to trad pub.
The premise is: most of what gets submitted to editors is rejected immediately because it doesn’t meet basic standards of competence in presentation and language use. Here’s how to meet those standards – and, by the way, meeting them will help with self-publishing too, since some readers also reject books that don’t meet them.
Topics I would cover include:
– How editors select what to publish (and what not to publish)
– How to find short story markets
– Basics of Standard Manuscript Format
– Commonly confused words and how to distinguish them
– Apostrophe wrangling
– Befriending the comma (that one would require a few posts)
– The dangling participle and how to avoid it
– The past of the past: how not to make your reader tense with confusion
– Tricks to ensure that you haven’t missed words from your sentences
– Varying your sentence structure for fun and profit
– Concise, active writing
I’m open to suggestions on what else to include.
Note: this isn’t about writing the actual story, which is another set of skills above and beyond these. This is about meeting the basic standards that will get your story read in the first place. I review a lot of books, and I see the same errors over and over. Most of them are simple to correct.
Originally shared by Karen Woodward
Loved this analysis by Mike Reeves-McMillan of Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth“.
#shortstorychallenge
http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks/2014/01/21/short-story-challenge-begins/
This is what my current Pieces profile on The Submission Grinder looks like.
I’ve worked hard on “Something Rich and Strange”.
It’s been through five versions and is currently on submission to its seventh market. After feedback from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I tightened up the beginning. After another rejection or two, I expanded the middle and gave the protagonist more agency. And I’ve just sent it back to The Overcast, whose editor mostly liked it but wanted me to give it a stronger ending.
Hopefully, they’ll like the changes.
#shortstorychallenge
So it looks like I’m already about halfway through drafting The Well-Presented Manuscript, my only-what-you-need-to-know guide to looking like a professional when you send your writing out into the world.
There will be about 16 chapters, maybe 20,000 words. That seems like a good balance between “covers the material adequately” and “goes into too much detail”.
In the latest post on The Well-Presented Manuscript, I give you just enough about the punctuation marks (other than apostrophes and commas) to help you look professional.
Bear in mind that every mistake I talk about in this blog series is something I’ve seen in a published book. Often more than one.
http://csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms/punctuated-equilibrium/