feed your characters / readers a steady diet of... cues that begin to add up to some conclusion... But the pieces don’t quite add up—so the reader must continue on. You keep your reader guessing.
Desire + Conflict = Dramahttp://www.danacameron.com/for-writers.html
We know that if you experience the same thing over and over again, you get diminishing results. We have to constantly switch things up. That could be with story, characters, environment, or it could be with this "set-piece moment"
in moments of action, when people are breaking down doors or ducking a bullet, they aren't feeling any deep complex emotions... In the moment {of preparation or aftermath}... there are deep complex emotions at play... {it} shows so much more than just a battle...it shows character and relationships.http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/picking-right-moment-to-illustrate.html
how close you are to the action, what you allow your reader to see vs. what is left out, what you linger on narratively, the speed through which you move through the action. . .This all affects the reader's perception and mood.
If you’re just getting to know a narrative world you’re creating, think of yourself as a camera moving through the action, and try to write down as much of what you see as you can. Then, after some time has passed, look at that piece of writing again, and edit down the details so that they serve the primary story you want to tell and ideas you want to convey.
scenes... are defined not by our words as much as they are by what happens in them.
grounding is the fine art of letting the reader know what is going on. You need to focus on some basics: Who is in a scene? Where does it take place? What is the major conflict?
Those questions need to be answered quickly with every scene in a book or story... You could do worse than to start a story with all three elements in the very first sentence: “Johann did not want to die on the moon, but when the asteroid struck the dome above Callisto Crater, it looked as if he didn’t have any other options.”
We’re biologically geared to take notice of things in motion. Anything that moves of its own volition is either potential food or a potential threat... So instead of having your character “sitting” in a perfectly still forest, describe the trees swaying in a soft breeze... or show the squirrels racing up the boles of pine trees, or tell of the sound of a branch snapping, which might portend danger.
One writing exercise that I find that works well for the opening of tale is to describe the scene using only active verbs (no was, or were, or anything that shows a static setting.)
emotion... {is} what makes a fight scene interesting, and it’s what gives the reader a stake in its outcome. The rest, the technical stuff (the mechanics of throwing punches, of laying down sentences, of word choice), that’s just window-dressing.
There have to be (at least) two things going on {in each scene/story} that can play off against each other, inform each other, head off and rejoin each other, twist around and complicate.
while I was writing out my little description of what I was going to write... I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn't find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely.
do your characters make good entrances in your novels...?
think about your character's body posture and manner of walking and what they're likely to look like at this moment in the narrative. Think about what your character's current objective is when he's walking and how this will affect pace and gesture.
