There’s a scene in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects that gave me goosebumps, except the action responsible for said goosebumps had nothing to do with the plot. Click the title above to continue reading.
Category: On Writing
How to strategically edit for timeline inconsistencies (#IWSG blog hop)
I write crime fiction, so there are often references to when the crime occurred in relation to when in the story the discussion about the crime is taking place. “The girl with the blue hair, I saw her four days ago in the alley behind the curling club,” for example. Here’s my two-step, no-software-required process for ironing out timeline inconsistencies.
The value in reworking your metaphors #AuthorToolboxBlogHop
Have you ever noticed, when reading a metaphor, that the idea is solid, but the execution hasn’t quite hit the mark? And when I say metaphor, I’m referring to all subcategories of metaphorical language (simile, metaphor personification, etc.) For this post, I’ve decided to take early drafts of some of my own metaphors from my current novel, describe what wasn’t working, and then you can compare it to the revision. My hope is that this will help other writers identify issues with their own metaphorical language and rework accordingly. Click the title above to continue reading.
My Microsoft Word manuscript template for authors (#IWSG Blog Hop)
A few chapters into my first book, I got fed up with all the scrolling. Many authors use apps such as Scrivener to more easily move between chapters and scenes. Scrivener has many other functions, but I prefer working in Microsoft Word. I decided to take advantage of Word’s table, linking, and formula functions, and the result is a template, that after much tinkering, does everything I need it to do. Click the title above to continue reading and to find the template.
How to spice up setting with an event (#IWSG blog hop)
In Jessica Strawser’s debut Almost Missed You, two characters have a life-changing date at Cincinnati’s Lumenocity, an orchestra-curated light-show. Anyone remember the scene when Harrison Ford’s Richard Kimble slips into Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade to evade pursuers? How much more exciting does Pride and Prejudice become once the Bennett sisters have a ball to look forward to? Some of these events are more integral to plot than others, but all of them make the stories they’re included in more interesting as a result. Click the title above to continue reading.
Don’t kill your darlings; shelve them (#IWSG Blog Hop)
One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a new writer was how to be okay with killing my darlings. What I determined was that while some of my darlings warranted murder-by-delete-key, others deserved a less permanent fate. I developed a two-step process to be able to refer back to all the darlings I’ve killed along the way. Click the title above to continue reading.
The Lady Bird way to show passage of time #AuthorToolboxBlogHop
I was watching Lady Bird recently. It’s summer in the beginning when the protagonist breaks her arm, and then a whole bunch of stuff happens, including Thanksgiving, and then cut to her cast being taken off, and I instantly had a sense of how much time has passed. Click the title above to continue reading.
Careful what you read while you write (#IWSG Blog Hop)
At the beginning of this year, I was ready to write the last 60,000 words of a novel. Me, my laptop, and my research were tucked away in a tropical paradise, but the words I was writing, they were reading like they’d been spewed out of a meat grinder. I decided to take the day off and finish the book I was reading instead. A few pages in, I realized I had no interest in finishing the book in question. The prose was uninspired, as was I. Click the title above to continue reading.
How to beta your book for emotional responses of readers #AuthorToolboxBlogHop
Test screening is to films what beta reading is to books. In film, studies are being done on technology that can gauge a test screen audience’s neuro and biometric responses. Suffice it to say, when this technology proves viable, I will not be able to afford it. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want a way to know which parts of my books make people laugh, cry, or want to throw their e-reader against the wall. Click the title above to continue reading.
How to vary your syntactic use of metaphor #AuthorToolboxBlogHop
I noticed recently that Sylvia Plath, in her novel The Bell Jar, favored verbs as delivery vehicles for metaphor. Don’t get me wrong; the woman could work a metaphor along the syntactic spectrum, but the verbs really stuck out for me, and it occurred to me that in my own work, which contains a fair amount of metaphorical language, I hadn’t yet mastered Plath’s skill with verbal metaphors. Hence, this post in which I workshop one metaphorical image using different parts of speech and different phrase types. Click the title above to continue reading.
Raimey Gallant 