Write Your Novel Step by Step (10)

Smoothing Out the Bumps
In Step 9 you integrated all your new material into your existing synopsis to create an all-inclusive description of your story’s world. In this step you’ll move things around and reword them so that your revised synopsis reads like butter.
You’ve come a long way. And, you’ve just completed a lot of hard work messing around with intangible ideas. Time to get literary again for a refreshing break.
Your job in this step is to reread your synopsis as it stands, not for content but from the standpoint of word play. For a moment, put story aside and think about how things are said rather than what is said. See if you can come up with a more interesting way to express the very same thing.
Don’t feel you have to get too stylistic or come up with memorable ways of phrasing things – brilliant lines of soaring prose that sweep the reader off their mundane little feet.
Nobody is going to see this final plot revision but you. The purpose is not yet to create a finished work. Rather, you just want to iron out the wrinkles, trim the jagged edges, and smooth out the bumps for a pleasant flowing read.
So, crank open the stop-cocks of verbiage and pave a way through the telling of your story.
In Step 11, we’ll fluff up your newly washed and folded story synopsis and see if we can shake some characters out of it.
Excerpted from the book, Write Your Novel Step by Step

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tannin Sensitivity (Sensitivity to Tannins)

Here's the ungarnished truth about tannins and tannin sensitivity. As you probably know, tannins are astringent polymers that naturally occur in coffee, tea, red wine and chocolate (among the most popular dietary sources). Effects of Tannins: Tannins may cause migraines, joint pain that mimics artheritis, tiredness, depression, bowel problems, problems with vision when focussing, digestion problems, thin brittle skin, perhaps hair loss and slow hair growth, and myriad other symptoms, both subtle and severe. For years I suffered a series of symptoms that I had pinned on coffee, uncertain about tea, and pretty sure were tied to red wine - no problem with chocolate. These symptoms were such diverse elements as - lethargy, tiredness, depression, joint pain in hips, shoulders and fingers, thin brittle skin, hair loss, slowed hair growth, slowed metabolism and even acid reflux and heartburn and diminished ability to focus closely, requiring reading glasses. I tried experim
Read more

What is Mental Relativity?

Mental Relativity is a new model of psychology that grew out of the development of the Dramatica Theory of Story. Dramatica's central concept is called the Story Mind. According to the theory, every story has a mind of its own - the structure represents the mind's psychology and the storytelling develops its personality. The Dramatica theory was used to create a computer model of the Story Mind, which was patented and became the core "Story Engine" of a software product, also called Dramatica, which is the best selling story development tool in the world. The Story Engine is actually able to predict a psychological structure for a story based on an author's answers to questions about his or her dramatic intent. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this same Story Mind model was also able to predict the psychologies of real people in addition to characters. In further exploring this unexpected outgrowth of the theory, we discovered that the model was
Read more

The War Between Creativity and Structure

Image
Perhaps the greatest hurdle in writing is the attempt to bring structure to a story without putting your Muse in a straight jacket. Often structure is brought into the picture too soon, clamping your passion into an iron maiden that pierces it more deeply with every turn of a structural screw until it bleeds out entirely. In contrast, writing with purposeless abandon creates a jellyfish of a story: an amorphous blob of subject matter with no spine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The  Master Storyteller Method  was designed to bring passion and structure together seamlessly, at the right place and the right time in the story development process. When first starting to write, our ideas usually come fast and furious. Many of them are little snippets: a notion for a line of dialog, a location in which some action will take place, the basic concept for a character, or perhaps a plot twist. Sometimes, we begin with no more than a period of history or a topic or an et
Read more