I found Sally in line for coffee as I entered the coffee shop. She had already dumped her bag onto a chair, had already tugged off her gloves, her wool jacket, and wore her game face. “What’s up? Did you not have a great thanksgiving?” “It was fine. But, I’m 3000 words away from finishing my novel.” “That’s great.” I shed my jacket and motioned to Kathy. She gave me a smile, already on my order. “No so much.” She retrieved her coffee and handed me mine. I nodded my appreciation. “Why?” “Because I only have 46000 words and I’m near the end of my novel.” “And?” “It’ supposed to be an 80,000 word novel! How am I going to come up with 30,000 more words?” “Oh, I see. You […]
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Writing a A Not So High Action Scene
So yesterday, we went through a high action scene, working through the details that went beyond structure to words and cadence. “But, Susie, I don’t write a thriller!” you say. Not a problem. You can still write a riveting scene using the basic princicples I laid out yesterday…. First, we: Start with Setting and the Current State of Affairs Then we establish the Goals of the scene And we won’t forget to fortify the Motivations of your characters action/decisions Finally we can write the Action of the scene. And we’re going to pay special mind to the sentence structure and words we use to create mood. This excerpt is from Finding Stefanie – it’s a subplot character named Gideon who wakes up in Stefanie’s house after […]
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