Rachel here: Have you heard “let the action unfold on stage” while studying the craft of writing? If not, you have now. (smile) On stage means “on the page.” As you write your story and plot your scenes a critical choice you face is deciding what must happen on stage, and what can happen “behind the scenes.” I’m starting a new book, “Love Begins with Elle” and am in the place of choosing my on stage scenes. What is important for the reader to invest in? No enough on stage action, and the readers don’t care. Too much, and I’ve bogged down the story with every little detail. The major scenes are easy. Like when the heroine meets the hero, when the heroine is proposed to, when the heroine realizes […]
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Prescriptions: Listen To Me! Ephiphany Week 4
By now, you should have figured out how to make your character suffer, and what his Black Moment is going to look like (and if not, that’s okay – just go back over the past three weeks of prescriptions and dig a little deeper). Today, we’re going to talk EPIPHANY. What is Epiphany? It’s the moment, right at the darkest in the plot when the character wakes up to the truth that has been dogging him the entire book and goes, AHA! (Accompanied by a little hand-to-head thump). It’s the moment when they figure it out, or perhaps the moment when they reach DEEP INSIDE to gather up the strength – physical or emotional that they didn’t know they had, to complete the task. How do we find that? Hint […]
Read the RestSelf Therapy: Bringing Setting to Life
Let’s talk setting. I mentioned in my notes yesterday about setting taking on a voice. It’s important for your book to have a setting that is alive, and contribures to the mood of the scene and book. But what if your setting, like Marshall University, doesn’t have a voice? What if it doesn’t need to function like a character, changing and growing. It still needs personality. In this scene from Reclaiming Nick, the Montana setting places a significant role in the story as a healer. Every character is, in some way, affected by the landscape. Maggy, one of the main characters, loves her life as a rancher. I wanted the land to act almost as an antagonist in the story, working against her. And to deepen its impact, I had […]
Read the RestDoctor’s Notes: Giving Place a Voice
I watched We are Marshall last night. Great movie – loved it, and even down to the outright frightening 1970’s styles. It a nutshell, it’s the story of Marshall University and their fight to find hope again after the death of their entire football team in a terrible plane crash. The movie is narrated by a cheerleader who loses her fiancé in the crash. Usually a football movie is about the coach, or one of the players (think: Friday Night Lights, or Rudy). In this movie, however, the main character is the TOWN. Yes, it features two coaches – Matthew Fox and Matthew McConaughey (two very good reasons to watch this movie), and a football player named Nate, but really, it’s about how a town moved from grief to hope. […]
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