What the frick does underwear have to do with writing a story? you may be asking. On S day we talked about stereotypes. Today’s post in our series is a strategy for avoiding accidental stereotypes: knowing thy characters. Inside and out. What their jobs, hobbies, favorite foods, preferred music, and maybe kinky tendencies are. Because the…
Today’s post in our series came up in the comments on POV day, because the two often go hand-in-hand. While POV determines through which character’s (or narrator’s) eyes we’re seeing the story, tense determines when the story is happening. Kind of. There are three basic tenses: past, present, and future. Stories are told in past and…
Holy title alliteration, Batman! Still, stereotyping stuff strips stories of satisfying substance. And now I’ve accidentally summarized the post in an alliterated sentence. I guess you can all go home. Kidding. Sit down. Stereotypes are overgeneralized ideas, and they are serious enough that if you google “narrative stereotypes” you get academic articles in the top…
This isn’t just about romance books, so don’t leave, other genre writers! Everyone back? Good. We are talking romance in our series today, but not about the romance category in the bookstore. We’re talking about writing romance in general, because most stories have a romantic subplot, at least. I’m generally not a fan of the…
How many different Q posts there will be in the A-Z challenge? There are fewer available words – I’m not sure how many bloggers will pick up on quarters, quizzes, and queens – or in the case of writing, maybe a quest. Perhaps our queen quickly quests into a quagmire. Damn. There are more possibilities than…
Ah, yes. We’ve reached one of my very favorite writing topics in our series. *cracks knuckles and wiggles fingers* I love point of view (POV from here on) so much I’ve written about it here and here and here and probably to a lesser extent in other posts. What can I say? POV gets me fired…
Yes, I spelled onomatopoeia wrong the first time. And the second time. And . . . well, let’s just all be thankful Google and dictionaries exist. Today in our series we’re talking about sensory words, including but not limited to the aforementioned ridiculously hard-to-spell one. Sensory words go very well with tomorrow’s topic (so be…
Hey, we’re officially halfway through our A-Z series already! I hope you’re still having fun, because I am. Today we’re talking character names. Naming a character seems like it should be easy, but sometimes it takes a lot of Google searching and resulting ads for baby stuff because the interwebs decided that searching for names…
Next up in our series, we’re talking about characters that make up a large subgroup of our cast: men (guess what the topic is for W). Women characters get a lot of airplay in the blogosphere, and rightfully so. I’m also discussing men because – and this may come as a shock to some of you –…
Today in our series, we’re stepping away from editing stuff and back into story creation – specifically, we’re spending time with our characters because we like them. Or maybe it’s because we tolerate living with them for the course of a story, as long as everything else in the story makes it worthwhile. Sometimes I hear…
Allison Maruska 