My story ideas usually start with a visualization of a scene in my head, often a dramatic moment. So, my novel Chase was initially just a picture in my mind: a bad-guy drug-dealer meets with one of his runners. The incident then turned into a scene which expanded into a full-length novel. Interestingly, I ended up cutting […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Patrick E. Craig adds action to Amish fiction
Women write the great majority of Amish fiction, and the stories tend to be light-hearted romances that work out in the end just because the characters are Amish. But light-hearted romance has never been my cup of tea. For me, from a man’s point of view, writing has always been about strong characters facing desperate […]
How a seat-of-the-pants writer can avoid rabbit trails
Most of the writers I have met seem to write mostly by the seat of the pants, meaning letting the muse take them through a scene rather than plotting it all out first. These are the “pantsters.” But there are some who dream up the story, plot it all out, and write it up. These […]
Detailed Action Creates Vivid Description
As you may have guessed after our discussion these past weeks on ways to use action to describe people and things, it’s also important to use action when describing…well…action. That may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s easier to forget than you might think. Here’s an example: The captain swung his sword in sweeping arcs and […]
More Descriptions with Action
Last week, our examples described a person, and we saw that weaving action into a description makes it a part of the story instead of stopping the forward motion of the plot to look at the person. We can do the same with things as well as people. Here are two more examples to show […]