It has been a very long time since your friendly neighborhood neurologist had anything to say here in Squills, so I thought I'd get on my soap box again in Speakers Corner and make myself known for just awhile.
1. SENSES
Be sure to think of all the five senses when you write, and try not to rely heavily on just one. As my best friend Skids once wrote in the margin of a draft of mine: There is more to life than sight.
2. DESCRIPTION
Try to be as original and dense in description as you can. The more original your description of something is, the more interesting it becomes. You could say that the lemon was sour, or that the lemon was so tart her face puckered up harshly.
3. DIALOGUE
I think Sam mentioned something on this before. Everyone has different speech patterns, different crutch words, or words they use frequently. So why not your characters? Get to know them, and incorporate their idiosyncracies into their dialogue.
4. CONNECT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
We talk a lot about common ground in english classes when writing papers. If you don't have a something that your audience can connect to, then they will lose interest or find your piece outlandish.
Example: I went to a play at our local theater, it was character based around two couples. There was a lot of yelling, calling names, and other similar things in it. One lady said that she could not take the play seriously because 'No one does that', besides thinking of her as a Brady child, it made me realize that because of that she could not connect with the piece. So building common ground is really vital. One person who is particularly excellent at common ground is Martin Luther King Jr., i.e. The Letter from Birmingham Jail.
5. THE BEGINNING OF THINGS
Ari once told me: You're always very good at the whole "I'm going to drop you in the middle of a story and not explain what's going on until later" thing, which is so dang spiffy.
Resist the urge to explain everything.
Lawrence Block says "Don't begin at the beginning." In other words begin in medias res, in the middle of things. If you reader knew everything at the beginning, they wouldn't need a whole book.
Starting things in the middle of a situation also brings in suspense into the fray. Many authors have this urge to explain the protagonist's background, education, characteristics, thinking that the reader will not understand without knowing everything about them. This is not the best way to go about things, leave things out to be explained later, and we will thank you for it.
6. GET TO KNOW YOUR CHARACTERS BETTER GAME
This is just a little word association game I picked up. Describe your characters in one...
Word
Color
Fear
Dream
Hope
Goal
Growth
Piece of Clothing
Food
Sense
Expression
7. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
Ever find yourself stuck when you are writing? You have Situation A and Situation C planned and executed to the nines, but where oh where is Situation B - and thus a potential chunck of your story is missing.
First, descide whether a B is necessary.
Second, figure in the time between A, B, and C.
Third, utilize flashbacks and dream sequences.
Fourth, don't get too glued to B, if you cannot figure out what to put there you can always come back to it later.
8. JUST A FRIENDLY LESSON FROM YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD NEUROLOGIST
The human brain needs to name something before it becomes real. The idea is that before something is named, it doesn’t really exist because either our awareness of it is too dim to understand it, or, we haven’t noticed it yet, subsequently it might as well not be there.
The important thing being that once named an object can then exist to someone who hasn’t actually seen it. This is why the numerous varieties of fiction work.
So your mission, if you choose to except it is to surplant images, feelings, objects into the minds of your readers, and keep them entranced.
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