Monthly Archives: April 2016

Daily Writing Tip 46 of 100, The Border of Actuality

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Border of Actuality

Source – Elements of Fiction Writing – Plot by Ansen Dibell

Plot is the things characters do, feel, think, or say, that make a difference to what comes afterward.

If you once thought about dying your hair pink but never acted on the thought, that tells something about your psychology, but it’s not a potential story plot. If you really went ahead and did it, that not only tells about your psychology but creates repercussions, like a stone tossed in a pond. That might become the basis for a story like Fizgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”

Thought or emotion crosses the line into plot when it becomes action and causes reactions. Until then, attitudes, however interesting in themselves, are just potential, just cloudy possibilities. They’re static. They’re not going anywhere. Nothing comes of them.

No thought, in and of itself, is plot. No action, however dramatic, is plot if the story would have been about the same if it hadn’t happened at all. Any action, however seemingly trivial, can be vital and memorable if it has significant consequences and changes the story’s outcome.

Plotting is a way of looking at things. It’s a way of deciding what’s important and then showing it to be important through the way you construct and connect the major events of your story. It’s the way you show things mattering.

That’s a nice distinction – about when thoughts become plot. I wish more writers would take her advice and cut out the stuff that doesn’t matter. Life is too short.

Daily Writing Tip 45 of 100, The Blood and Guts of Descriptive Fiction

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Blood and Guts of Descriptive Fiction

Source – Description by Monica Wood

Simile and Metaphor

The strong imagery contained in simile and metaphor is the blood and guts of descriptive fiction. Without it you are working with a mere skeleton, telling rather than showing. Used well, simile and metaphor bring prose to life; paradoxically, however, its overuse can smother the prose and bury the story.

A simile is a figure of speech, usually introduced by like or as, that compares one thing to another:

Emmett is as relentless as a wolverine.
Jenny’s eyes shine like chips of onyx.

Because a simile’s sole function is comparison, it is not quite as evocative as a metaphor. A metaphor does not so much compare as transform one thing to another:

Luanne was a dainty little bird of a woman, given to quick movements.
Behind the house Feldman laid out four squadrons of flowers that sprouted, mute and soldierly, exactly where he had planted them.

Metaphor is subtler and more revealing than simile, evoking imagery beyond the original comparison.

There are few things as fun as collecting Bad Similes… (even if they have become something of a meme… for example:
The Worst Similes from High School Students
From House of Figs:

  • Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
  • He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
  • Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
  • From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
  • John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
  • She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
  • The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
  • He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
  • Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
  • She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

Daily Writing Tip 44 of 100, Recognize Them When They Show Up

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Recognize Them When They Show Up

Source – On Writing, by Stephen King

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Let me tell you how story ideas feel to me.

Where they come from, I have no idea. When they will come, I can’t predict. Why they come, I can’t explain – but come they do.

They feel like a serious itch – or like a stone in my shoe. Something that I, no matter how hard I try, can’t get out of the forefront of my mind. I really can’t think of anything else.

Until I write them out – write them away. Then and only then will they leave me alone and I can get on with my life. It’s a need, an addiction – graphomania, if you will.

Everyone has addictions – the question is if you can live with your addiction or even control it and make it work for you. I think that for me, for my graphomania, I can work it out.

Daily Writing Tip 43 of 100, The Meaning of Fiction

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Meaning of Fiction

Source – “Writing Short Stories” from Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

This is such a truth about writing and reading. I know a few literature instructors I have met over the decades that need to read this carefully and take it to heart.

Daily Writing Tip 42 of 100, Narrative Drag Is an Absence of Things

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Narrative Drag Is an Absence of Things

Source – Fiction is Folks by Robert Newton Peck

Bring a thing into the scene and the audience moves an inch forward on their seats, to be close to the stage. Again, let me stress that the thing doesn’t have to be a bomb so large that it will blow up the Pentagon.

Of course, it could be a bomb big enough to blow up the Pentagon… depends on your genre. Good advice, though, when you are stuck and when things seem slowed to a halt – bring in something physical – however small.

Or big.

There’s A Brand New Dance

Posted on by Bill Chance

There’s a brand new dance but I don’t know its name
That people from bad homes do again and again
It’s big and it’s bland full of tension and fear
They do it over there but we don’t do it here
—-David Bowie, Fashion

Main Street Park Dallas, Texas

Main Street Park
Dallas, Texas

Daily Writing Tip 41 of 100, The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly

Source – If You Want To Write by Brenda Ueland

Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that good ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but the better they are.

Good advice… I guess. Still like my coffee, though.

Daily Writing Tip 40 of 100, Testing and Deepening Your Characters

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Testing and Deepening Your Characters

Source – Writing the Short Story, A Hands-On Program, by Jack M. Bickham

Readers often ask whether writers start with plot or with character in developing stories. It’s the kind of question most writers can’t begin to answer because plot ideas tend to spring forth with characters already in them and characters usually spring out of the imagination with some of their plot problems already nagging them.

To put it another way: Good plots involve vivid characters, and good characters are always involved in a plot that tests their mettle.

This makes a lot of sense. Over the years I have had folks talk about making cards with ideas on them – plot cards, character cards, theme cards, setting cards…. The plot and character cards were the hardest. I think the mistake is to separate them like that.

So maybe I need to think about plot/character hybrid cards? Or one step further – plot/character/conflict cards.

Yeah… that might be the ticket.

I Told Them the Truth

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.”
― Frank Norris, McTeague

Recycled Books Denton, Texas

Recycled Books
Denton, Texas