Articles about writing.
I love to read, and now I’m in the privileged position that my job is to write. I love everything about it. My career started with blogs and articles, then I moved into finally releasing the book I’d been working on for a decade, and now I’m finally making a movie. I’ve been asked if, now making more films is a potential for my future, would I ever want to go back to writing books?
Show don’t tell is a piece of writing advice that is regularly given to writers, but without development it can be hard to understand. I previously wrote about showing not telling your character’s environment and actions, but for this I’ll be focusing on what show don’t tell means in relation to your characters emotions and feelings.
One of the key ingredients to a successful story is for your characters to be well motivated. Your Protagonist, your main character, wants something and is motivated enough to after it, and you write that journey. But the conflict lock is what turns it from some random events into a real story.
Your story “continuity” is making sure that from one scene to another, nothing changes about the people or the environment they’re in, that wasn’t intended to change and tracked by the writer. In film and TV errors, continuity errors can happen due to wardrobes changing suddenly, placement of props on the set, or weather, but I’ll be focusing specifically on the written word because as a writer the story continuity is your responsibility to control.
When you’re writing a story, usually you use with first or third person. First person refers to the Protagonist as I, and third person refers to the Protagonist as He or She. I’m going to be explaining the use of a POV (Point Of View) Character in third person, and how you can use them for connecting your reader to the other characters in the scene and the setting they’re in, without overloading your audience with unnecessary detail.
I’ve written before about how powerful fiction is, and how we can use our stories to do good in the world. Today I’m writing specifically about how we can use our stories to fight the problem of oppressive, and regressive, gender stereotypes.
If your book is too dialogue heavy, it can read like a script. You don’t get to know the environment your characters are in, or connect with their interiority in a way that you can relate to their emotions. However, if your book is too prose heavy, it can make it hard to get to know the characters because so much of how we ground ourselves in our characters is in how they communicate with each other. So, it’s important to strike a good prose to dialogue ratio.
Sometimes as part of your story, you’ll have information that needs to be delivered in order for the story to make sense. This could be rules of magical lore within your Universe, details of a quest your character goes on, world building about the environment they live in if you’re writing in high fantasy or sci fi, or politics of the time such as a war they’ve been engaged in or who is in charge. But, ultimately, either your audience, or both your character and your audience, need information to be delivered to them in order for you to tell your story.
Stories are powerful, and I truly believe that stories have the power to change the world. With stories we can explore social issues such as racism, domestic violence, sexism and more, in a way that’s accessible and interesting, whilst exploring multiple opinions and experiences through the eyes of different characters.
Assuming you’re writing commercial fiction designed to sell, rather than just a personal project never intended to be read by anyone else, should you be focusing your energy on writing for yourself, or writing for your audience? Neither is technically wrong, so whether you’re choosing to write what makes you happy or to make your readers happy, you’re not necessarily doing the wrong thing, but their are arguments to support both approaches.