Reading Verbs
Know your verbs and your story will flow smoothly and read naturally. Verbs find two expressions relevant to the storyteller, tense and voice. Voice defines the perception of the action, controls...
View ArticleScene It
Action in a novel happens through dialog, description, and exposition. Dialog is the beating emotional heart of your characters, but it cannot stand alone; dialog needs setting and motion in order to...
View ArticleA Brief Time of History
Exposition lays out all the groundwork in a novel that the reader cannot experience directly. Description provides those images and sensations that can be sense or felt, completing a mental picture of...
View ArticleDial Log
Dialog allows characters to interact with their setting, with each other, and with the reader. Dialog challenges the writer in both use and execution, both technically and artistically. The rules of...
View ArticleParagraphically Speaking
If sentences may thought of as the bones of a story, the humble paragraph provides the muscle that gives a story strength and endurance. Artistic strength and endurance come from another source;...
View ArticleFunctional Chapter Composition
A novel is a difficult thing to read directly through from beginning to end. Chapter divisions form an important part of novel construction, one that governs how a reader perceives the story and...
View ArticleDo You See What I See
Stories are told from a point of view. In fiction this is either first-person, third-person, or narrative. The popular Choose Your Own Adventure series used the second-person point of view in their...
View ArticleTimeline Perception
Pacing in a novel involves more than just the frequency of events; novel pacing includes structuring the scenes so that the reader maintains an internal timeline of events corresponding to their place...
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