Last week, we learned the difference between Character Driven fiction and plot-driven fiction. But whether the focus of your story is the character or the things that happen, understanding and managing your characters’ motivations is the key to managing plot and tension. What is motivation? It is the inner drive […]
Monthly Archives: June 2014
21 posts
Today we have a special treat! Amanda June Hagarty, a talented and gregarious local writer, editor, and social media maven has agreed to help me out with a guest post about what it really means to write character-driven fiction. It’s a term we all toss around a lot, but how […]
Just as a movie camera cannot film anything beyond its scope, or outside of its field of view, your POV narrator cannot know, and therefor cannot tell the reader, anything that he or she does not know. This presents a challenge, because sometimes it’s very tempting to try to sneak in […]
When I write books, I like to strongly develop multiple characters and pit their motives against each other. Because of this, and because my books contain multiple threads of plot, some immediately related to each other, and some that don’t combine until much further along in the story, it makes […]
Point of view tends to be defined in absolutes by writing guides and teachers, but actually, it works more like a spectrum. Think of a camera filming a movie. It is not limited to close-up and wide-shot, but can actually be placed at any distance from, and any angle to, […]
There’s one thing that every story in recorded history has in common, and probably in unrecorded history as well: Stories are about people. Even stories about animals, such as Watership Down, are really about people. The people are merely represented by animals. Stories are told by people, about people, for […]