Category: Other Cool Blogs

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words July 9, 2010

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of fantasista at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Beta Readers

Your opus is complete, over sixty-five thousand words which you know … well, hope … connect together for a story. A few of your friends and family members have offered to help you by reading your stuff. Beta Readers! You’ve been told you need them so you sign up the ten of your nearest and dearest who have volunteered.

George, Carrie, and Anne tell you it’s the best stuff they ever read and sure to be a best-seller. Miller and Evans never get back to you. Ingrid sends back several pages of things which need fixing to make your science fiction story have a proper romance; you aren’t writing a romance. But Marc, Simone, Duck, and Margaret responded with vague things about “I think something is wrong somewhere after the beginning.” and “The big fight didn’t make sense.” and “Some characters need work.”

For the future, mark the first five off your list. You don’t need fans reading your stuff; you need critics who get back to you. Ingrid should write her own book if she thinks the world needs more romances. The other four, well, they need some guidance.

Fortunately guidance is at hand thanks to a Magical Words post written by AJ Hartley on the ABCs of Beta Readers. When the blog group created, “How to Write Magical Words: A Writer’s Companion” this post picked as a best-of-the-best and Mr. Hartley made a minor modification with the letter “D” making it even better (see page 220 of the book).

Give your beta readers the ABCDs and ask them to only write the letter as they read through:

A = Awesome. This part is really, really good.

B = Bored now. I’m about to put down the book if things don’t pick up soon.

C = Confused. I backed up, re-read, and … huh?

D = Don’t Believe It. Girl, this is worse than the D&D game where we all had +5 weapons at first level. Dude, I don’t know how you cook, but bread takes more than 10 minutes to rise.

Previous posts on Beta Reading can be found: here.

Other Cool Blogs: Horror Writers Association January 30, 2017

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Idea go at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Bad Guys

Read outside your genre, they say.

But I don’t wanna. Horror scares me.

Isn’t that the point? Yeah, but recreational reading shouldn’t be uncomfortable. The challenge is finding the balance between having fun and branching into new territory to get more tools for the writing toolbox (which with a love of urban fantasy, military science fiction, superhero prose, and sweet romance with an occasional dip cozy mystery I am doing fairly well). One way to accomplish expansion of the horizons is looking at blogs in the genres you avoid for one reason or another.

I ran across this particular post by the Horror Writers Association through the recommendation of another friend, “Peekaboo with the Devil: Strategies for Hiding and Revealing Your Antagonist” written by Mac Childs. The focus is on horror antagonists, monsters and serial killers, instead of the bad guys found in romance and superhero prose, but that doesn’t mean the tools of hiding the Big Bad until the last fight shouldn’t be in the tool box.

What I want to remember from the blog:

  1. Big Bad backstory may be detailed in my head, but skimpy on the reveal to readers. The less they know, the more the readers fill in with their own personal monsters.
  2. A indirect reveal (through a keyhole) of the Big Bad causally dealing with a minion the main character (MC) just barely survived defines power stakes in a scary, but initially survival fashion.
  3. Small subtle evils can be scarier than big shows.
  4. I want to write a bait-and-switch baddie.

“the kind that tricks others into thinking they’re harmless (maybe even helpful), lulling the protagonist and readers into a false sense of security and then striking while everyone is watching the flashier villain.”

Other advice is provided in the post. Find the ones which speak to you here: https://horror.org/peekaboo-with-the-devil/

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words February 12, 2009

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Silatip at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why Write?

An elegant question asked by Misty Massey in her 2009 blog post. I was about to bop by it looking for today’s Magical Words, because everyone knows the answer “I write because I have to”, when I hit the showstopper in the comments by Phiala (Sarah Goslee), which made me think:

“Even many successful writers say that they write because they have to, and often go on to say that you SHOULDN’T write unless you have to. That leads to self-doubt, at least in me. I don’t have to write, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing it?

But I have stories to tell!”

Honestly, I don’t have to write. It’s one of the reasons I often go months without putting hands-on-keyboard for fictional purposes.

I have to read. Honest-to-goodness simple must. When I feel the edges creep in of the mad world, I go into a Fiction Fit and swallow three books at a time. A hundred books in a year. Year after year after year.

And I tell myself stories. Fanfiction from television, movies, and books. True-to-life speculations and wild tales. New stories. Old stories. Revisits, revision. At least one “novel” a week, and several “short stories”.

Some of them are really, really good, and I want to share them.

If you would like to see the whole Magical Words post with comments: http://www.magicalwords.net/misty-massey/why-write/

Why do you write?

Other Cool Blogs: Writers Helping Writers November 18, 2015

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of vectorolie at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How Many Cameras Do You Need?

POV (Point-of-view) characters are the cameras recording the action in a book. Like television and movies, specialty cameras in writing may be close-up exclusive, close first person, or used in panning shots, omniscient third person. Different genres required different cameras. In movies, science fiction now demands the Steadicam while horror like a bouncing “you are there” feel of handheld video. In books, first person is popular for urban fantasy and superhero while epic fantasy likes third person with switching POVs between cast members.

When dealing with multiple cameras, POVs, how much is too much? Marcy Kennedy addresses the question during her guest appearance on Writers Helping Writers via a post entitled “How to Decide How Many POV Characters Our Book Needs“.

Central questions to figure out which POV are needed:

  1. Who is the protagonist?
  2. Would it improve the story to include scenes from the antagonist’s viewpoint?
  3. What’s the scope of our story?
  4. Which characters play a key role at the climax of the novel?

To see these questions (and more) expanded, visit the posting here: http://writershelpingwriters.net/2015/11/how-to-decide-how-many-pov-characters-our-book-needs/