| mary rosenblum | Hello, all!
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| mary rosenblum | This is our After Hours Forum, with me, Mary Rosenblum, your web editor. I've published seven novels and more than 60 short stories and will do my best to answer any questions you have. If you're new here, remember that you need to click on the 'Ask a Question' button or the 'word bubble' next to the red question mark at the top of the screen in order to ask a question. Your regular 'send' bar won't reach me! Or you can use /ask and type your question into the regular send bar if that works better for you..
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| mary rosenblum | I hope you all have had a good week!
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| mary rosenblum | Just a note to all of you who sent short short fiction to storyhouse.com...
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| mary rosenblum | a coffee roaster who prints short short stories on their coffee labels..
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| mary rosenblum | I know a lot of people thought their submissions had gotten lost since they didnt hear back for months...
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| mary rosenblum | but lo and behold, I just got a contract for a story I sent them in October of 03, so don't cross them off your list of hopefuls yet.
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| mary rosenblum | Back story is something that gives novice writers a hard time.
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| tory | Mary does that mean you couldn't try to sell it anywhere else for a year?
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| mary rosenblum | Well, Tory, no, if I had wanted to sell it somewhere else, I would have had to withdraaw it from Storyhouse's consideration first.
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| mary rosenblum | But you know what? I spent a half hour writing that story and I really didn't have any other market in mind for it, so why not let it sit? If I had stumbled over another, I would have wiithdrawn it.
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| mary rosenblum | One thing that will really help you starting out...
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| mary rosenblum | be prolific.
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| mary rosenblum | If you have many stories finished and 'in inventory', then you have options when you find a new market.
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| mary rosenblum | If you finish a story and can't think of the right market, or you have two stories there already, just hang onto it.
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| mary rosenblum | When a market pops up, you've got it. And if you have many stories out, you are going to spend less time...
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| mary rosenblum | chewing your nails and waiting.
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| info | If you withdraw, do you have to wait before selling elsewher
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| mary rosenblum | Nope. If you get tired of waiting for an editor, you send that editor a letter saying, "I am withdrawing my story [title] from consideration for your magazine' and the moment that mailbox door bangs, send it off.
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| mary rosenblum | The story, I mean.
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| mary rosenblum | BUT for those of you who have not heard back from storyhouse, you may get a contract.
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| mary rosenblum | Okay...back to back story. Now there's a confusing sentence!
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| mary rosenblum | Most new writers read novels more than short stories...not all, but many.
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| mary rosenblum | And novels traditionallly begin by setting up the 'baseline' so to speak.
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| mary rosenblum | We meet the characters, find out about their lives, the setting, and so forth...
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| mary rosenblum | and then, maybe at the end of chapter one, the plot finally gets under way.
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| mary rosenblum | So many new writers do the same thing for a short story. Set the scene, introduce the characters, and then...maybe on page three. get the story rolling.
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| mary rosenblum | Buuuuttt... short story readers have different expectations than novel readers...
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| mary rosenblum | and you simply have fewer words to play with.
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| mary rosenblum | So you can't really do this effectively.
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| mary rosenblum | Instead, you do this paperfolding trick with your words, where you overlap setting, character introduction and plot so that it all happens at once.
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| mary rosenblum | The plot hooks us and pulls us along but at the same time we are absorb necessary details of who, where, why, when and so forth.
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| mary rosenblum | Realize that the reader does not expect to learn everything in the first paragraph.
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| mary rosenblum | You can sprinkle in details as you roll along, and by the end of the scene, your readers should have a pretty clear idea of who is doing what to whom, where, and why.
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| mary rosenblum | In reality, your opening is probably going to take you more work than any other part of your story.
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| mary rosenblum | By the time you get to the end, your whole story has pointed us to that moment, and we should just fall into it.
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| mary rosenblum | But getting that jet off the ground...uuuf...that takes WORK!
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| mary rosenblum | Often a great opening scene pops into mind.
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| mary rosenblum | But before you totally commit to it, ask yourself...will my reader know who, where, why, and what and when by the end...or at least have a clue?
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| mary rosenblum | WE don't have to KNOW if we can guess where we're going.
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| mary rosenblum | Go ahead and write that scene. Now sit down, sharpen the pen, and figure out how to plant clues in there without ruining the pace of that scene.
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| mary rosenblum | Hard to do? Not really...just takes practice.
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| mary rosenblum | Remember that those of us who work in the speculative genres, like SF, horror, and fantasy, and those who set their stories...
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| mary rosenblum | in another country or unfamiliar mileau, will need to create the setting, and not just mention chairs, tables, trees and other..
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| mary rosenblum | mundane items that need to explanation.
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| mary rosenblum | This is where Show Don't Tell is really a fine art. YOUR voice in that start, YOUR explanation can really make the ending read flat.
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| mary rosenblum | Let your characters show us the back story, or offer us clues as they chat.
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| curseofthe44 | My LR instructor has told me to get all the info out there right away. Make it clear; readers (and editors) don't (and won't) want to wait for details.
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| mary rosenblum | That's good advice, but if you just do an info dump and nothing else, and the editor has a nice dynamic scene that includes the same info and action...which do you think will sell?
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| mary rosenblum | Depending on what genre you write for, you can get away with that info dump start at times.
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| mary rosenblum | It is MUCH harder to get away with in mystery, sf, horror, fantasy and action adventure.
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| mary rosenblum | You can do it in literary mainstream but stylistically, that is a very different type of writing from the other fiction genres.
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| mary rosenblum | A strong scene can include a lot of back story and do so quite invisibly.
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| mary rosenblum | This is our After Hours Forum, with me, Mary Rosenblum, your web editor. I've published seven novels and more than 60 short stories and will do my best to answer any questions you have. If you're new here, remember that you need to click on the 'Ask a Question' button or the 'word bubble' next to the red question mark at the top of the screen in order to ask a question. Your regular 'send' bar won't reach me! Or you can use /ask and type your question into the regular send bar if that works better for you..
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| mary rosenblum | Ducky sent me a paragraph last week for our opening-paragraph critique section.
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| mary rosenblum | She sent me her revised version and this revision is an excellent example of a lot of back story slipped into a scene.
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| mary rosenblum | We were sitting under the shade tree out back of the house that afternoon.
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| mary rosenblum | Late August in Arkansas is unforgiving. The sun beat down with a vengeance and the humidity hung so heavy in the air it needed suspenders to stay up there. My sister and I had big quart Mason jars full of iced tea and they were sweating harder than we were.
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| mary rosenblum | This is the original. What back story do we have?
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| mary rosenblum | Late August. Arkansas. Sister and narrator. That's it.
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| mary rosenblum | I'll drop in the new version.
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| mary rosenblum | "I need a cigarette." Helen said, dragging the back of her hand across her dripping brow. "Shh, Helen she'll hear you and you know she'll beat the tar out of you for even saying that!" I hissed. We were sitting under the shade tree out back of the house that afternoon. Not that the shade helped. Late August in Arkansas is unforgiving. "Wouldn't be the first time." Helen said quietly, grinning. My sister was impossible. "Helen Joyce, I swear sometimes I think you like gettin' beat!"
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| mary rosenblum | Helen smiled and giggled, picked up another peach and started to peel. "I don't care. I'm gonna do what I want." She looked up from her bowl and out toward a big oak tree by the pasture. "I think I left my cigarettes behind that tree. I'll go see in a minute." The sun beat down with a vengeance and the humidity hung so heavy in the air it needed suspenders to stay up there. My sister and I had big quart Mason jars full of iced tea and they were sweating harder than we were.
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| mary rosenblum | Okay, here we have the same action...two kids sitting in the hot Arkansas afternoon, sister and narrator.
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| mary rosenblum | But now we have Helen, her cigarettes and a lot of clues about family disharmony, her smoking, her beatings and her attitude about it.
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| mary rosenblum | We have more visuals...the oak tree, pasture, we're on a farm.
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| mary rosenblum | We've learned a lot and ducky never intruded to tell us this.
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| mary rosenblum | By the time we move on to the next scene, we're pretty well grounded in these two characters.
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| mary rosenblum | We don't know everything, but we know enough to see them as more three dimensional than in the first version, and have some...
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| mary rosenblum | knowlege that will help us figure out what is going on in the next scene.
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| mary rosenblum | All that ducky did was to fill in details and let the characters tell us a lot as they talk.
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| mary rosenblum | Mostly, they told us about Helen and her role in the family.
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| mary rosenblum | Start your story with some action, even if it's nothing more than getting ready for work.
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| mary rosenblum | Say we start with Ben. He is getting ready for work.
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| mary rosenblum | What do readers need to know here?
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| mary rosenblum | Where he works, right?
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| mary rosenblum | A bit about him.
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| mary rosenblum | A bit of visual description.
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| mary rosenblum | So as he shaves, dresses, and heads out to catch the bus we can easily learn...
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| mary rosenblum | he's a meat cutter for the local store, a disappointment to his Mom who wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor...
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| mary rosenblum | just broke up with his girlfriend, is a lousy housekeeper,and can't even afford a car.
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| mary rosenblum | How do we find all that out?
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| mary rosenblum | He might have cuts on his hands...he's a new hire and just learning. Maybe thinks about his boss who is missing two fingers!
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| mary rosenblum | We SEE that the place is a mess as he dumps dirty laundry off the sofa as he searches madly for his ringing cell phone.
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| mary rosenblum | Mom nags him again about when is he going to get his application in for community college, when he answers the phone...
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| mary rosenblum | He's going to miss his bus now, and thinks longingly of when he'll have the down payment for the pickup and hey, at least he doesn't have to take Sally out to dinner and buy her stuff, so maybe it's good riddance...
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| mary rosenblum | And all this as he's dashing around doing morning things.
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| mary rosenblum | If we need a bit more drama, we can make it clear that if he DOES miss the bus, this will be his third late morning and Mr. Scott, his boss, said he's fired...
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| mary rosenblum | That adds a 'ticking clock' and ups the tension.
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| roe | you are going to write this paragraph aren't you LOL
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| mary rosenblum | Oh, if you insist.
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| mary rosenblum | The cell phone's shrill dragged his head from under his pillow. Late again! Lousy cheap alarm clock. He scrambled out of bed, tangled his foot in the sheets landed face down on the ...
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| mary rosenblum | carpet his nose on a cigarette butt. No time for a shower. Shave and get moving. One more late morning and old Scotty said he'd can him. Old goat.
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| mary rosenblum | Brad slathered shaving cream on his face, winced as the cell shrilled again.
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| mary rosenblum | Just Mom. But maybe...just maybe Sally...
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| mary rosenblum | He threw the dull razor into the sink and started digging through the mountain of dirty laundry at the foot of his bed. Gotta be there...
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| mary rosenblum | Grabbed it. "Hello?"
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| mary rosenblum | Brad, you're later aren't you, sweetie? Don't you have to be at work at eight?
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| mary rosenblum | "Yeah, mom, so I gotta go..."
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| mary rosenblum | "Did you get that application mailed? You know, the one to the community college. You don't want to be a meat cutter all your life. Just look at your hands, Braddy baby."
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| mary rosenblum | What? She had xray vision? "Mom, really, gotta go." He scowled at the healing slices...
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| mary rosenblum | That's how you do it. And by keeping up a fast pace...he'll drop the phone, scrape off a few whiskers, and tuck in his shirt as he dashes down the stairs...
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| mary rosenblum | you can feed the reader information while the story rolls forward.
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| roe | I love it, thank you Now to figure out how to do it myself.
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| mary rosenblum | It's not that hard.
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| mary rosenblum | A good exercise is to begin with a chain of action.
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| mary rosenblum | Then ask yourself what your reader MUST know in order to 'get' the scene.
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| mary rosenblum | Then start figuring out how to slip in the things that reveal those clues.
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| mary rosenblum | Might be thought, another character's words, a few details.
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| mary rosenblum | The cigarette butt on the floor and the dirty laundry give us a messy apartment.
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| mary rosenblum | This is a writing exercise I use with students at workshops.
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| mary rosenblum | Every one gets a description of basic action and a list of back story details.
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| mary rosenblum | Then they get to flesh out the action iwht the details.
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| mary rosenblum | And you do the same thing all the way through the story.
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| mary rosenblum | If we need know that the village our characters are approaching belongs to the Red Duke and is a dangerous place...
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| mary rosenblum | The travelers can decide on a story that will get them past the guards.
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| mary rosenblum | One of them currses the Red Duke for killing a cousin for no reason.
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| mary rosenblum | As they approach the village we notice the think and wary serfs in the fields...
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| mary rosenblum | the way people stop to stare at them.
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| mary rosenblum | A crowd of children rushes out to beg. We know the village is poor, the Red Duke is not a nice man and an oppressive ruler...
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| mary rosenblum | and our heroes are on the other side.
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| mary rosenblum | There is one place that back story does NOT belong.
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| mary rosenblum | That is in a life and death action scene.
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| mary rosenblum | If your MC is fleeing for her life from a hungry dragonet...
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| mary rosenblum | she is not going to waste a single thought on the antiquity of the stones she is scrambling over.
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| mary rosenblum | Who cares if they were put there by magic 5000 years ago? She is about to get eaten!
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| mary rosenblum | They are obstacles and that's IT.
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| mary rosenblum | Helen smiled and giggled, picked up another peach and started to peel. "I don't care. I'm gonna do what I want." She looked up from her bowl and out toward a big oak tree by the pasture. "I think I left my cigarettes behind that tree. I'll go see in a minute." The sun beat down with a vengeance and the humidity hung so heavy in the air it needed suspenders to stay up there. My sister and I had big quart Mason jars full of iced tea and they were sweating harder than we were.
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| mary rosenblum | Oops...
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| mary rosenblum | dropped in the wrong segment... onemoment.
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| mary rosenblum | This is our After Hours Forum, with me, Mary Rosenblum, your web editor. I've published seven novels and more than 60 short stories and will do my best to answer any questions you have. If you're new here, remember that you need to click on the 'Ask a Question' button or the 'word bubble' next to the red question mark at the top of the screen in order to ask a question. Your regular 'send' bar won't reach me! Or you can use /ask and type your question into the regular send bar if that works better for you..
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| mary rosenblum | That's more like it. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | So how about if you come up with some examples?
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| mary rosenblum | Krya walks across the floor.
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| mary rosenblum | How can you show us that she is small, poor, and is a servant in the castle?
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| mary rosenblum | You can use more than one sentence. Anyone want to try?
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| mary rosenblum | Or Nigel, on his way to school. He's the nerd of the class, the last one chosen for any team, and he lives with his single parent father. Want to give that one a try?
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| t green | Krya clutched her worn, grey dress. Would the master notice her if she tried to slide behind the statues that lined the hallway? Maybe. Maybe not. He hardly ever noticed the servants unless he was yelling at them.
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| mary rosenblum | Good. We get action, and she's probably small and slight if she can hide behind a statue. She's a servant and the master of the place isn't very nice.
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| mary rosenblum | Tory, try /ask and then type your question in the regular send bar.
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| tory | Krya crept along the passageway, hugging the wall. Servants
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| tory | were not allowed in the masters quarters. It could get her
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| tory | killed.
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| mary rosenblum | That's a nice, dramatic moment, and you can add a lot of back story here as we find out why she's in a dangerous place like that.
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| curseofthe44 | The cold stones tingled in Krya's toes and up her legs. She peeked behind the heavy velvet curtains to see the master and lady eating in the candlelight. Her mother dugged Kyra away. "Child, come away."
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| mary rosenblum | That one gives us her age...a child...and the fact that this is a stone castle and cold!
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| mary rosenblum | And we have candles, not electricity.
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| info | Nigel swore he was going to he was going to get even with
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| info | them. His father didn't care that he was always picked last or
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| info | that he was nothing but a nerd to be picked on.
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| info | Maybe if his mother was still around, it'd be different.
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| mary rosenblum | That's good. Now that is all nigel's thought.
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| mary rosenblum | Be a bit careful when you use a lot of character thought to feed us back story to also give us action.
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| mary rosenblum | It is the action that keeps it moving.
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| mary rosenblum | Same thing with first person. When your MC is grumbling about his terrible childhood and how it ruined him for the knighthood...
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| mary rosenblum | be sure to give us something to watch, too.
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| mary rosenblum | There's a reason TV supplanted radio as the popular medium!
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| roe | The cold gritty floor scraped Krya's bare feet. Why am I always the one who has to get the coal for the fire. It's not fair, just because I'm the youngest.
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| mary rosenblum | Here we have youngest, coal for fires, so not modern...
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| mary rosenblum | One thing that really plagues a lot of writers is historical period.
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| mary rosenblum | If your story is set in 1940 or 1920 or 1850...how do you let the reader know?
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| curseofthe44 | Nigel shoved his thick glasses up his nose. Across from him glared the football team's starting lineup. "Hell, no. We don't want the geek." Nigel bit his lip. Nothing new in today's gym glass.
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| mary rosenblum | Yes, that makes it VERY clear where Nigel stands, and probably represents his social position in school in general.
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| mary rosenblum | It can be particularly challenging to pinpoint an historical era...your readers will vary enormously in how much history they know.
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| mary rosenblum | A Tin Lizzie will put us into the twenties for some readers but not others.
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| mary rosenblum | Often you simply have to give your character a reason to notice the date...
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| mary rosenblum | on a newspaper perhaps, or think in terms of a date...
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| mary rosenblum | It was the spring, five years after the Duke's Grand Memorial in the Year of Our Lord of 1542. I remember the first time I saw here...
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| mary rosenblum | So we're in 1547...
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| curseofthe44 | A Tin Lizzie?
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| mary rosenblum | See See? A Ford car..,.one of the first. There were quite a few on the road in the early 1920s.
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| mary rosenblum | Now if I was writing a narrative for Good Old Days, I could say 'Tin Lizzie' and I bet you 80percent of the readers would know just when I was talking about.
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| mary rosenblum | SF and fantasy can be particularly challenging. How do you let the reader know what that darn maguffin does if you don't tell 'em?
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| mary rosenblum | That really takes some thought at times. 'He touched his selection into the replicator and grabbed the mug, wincing as steaming coffee scalded his fingers.
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| t green | a REAL fantasy reader would know what a maguffin is, especially after that darned troll ate it and exploded!
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| mary rosenblum | Of if she stepped into it and found herself in Oz or on the back side of the moon. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | One thing to remember when you're working in backstory.
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| mary rosenblum | We readers all tend to leap to stereotypical conclusions.
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| mary rosenblum | Make those work for you.
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| mary rosenblum | If you have your soldiers march around in shiny boots snapping 'heil hitler' type salutes we're going to assume nasty, SS sorts...storm troopers.
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| mary rosenblum | That's a rather crude example, but you can use reader expectations to help readers make the right guesses.
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| mary rosenblum | But nearly always, action is the best way to slip description into the story.
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| mary rosenblum | And dialogue is the best way to embed information in a scene...
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| mary rosenblum | BUT...there you need to be very careful about that 'as we all know' dialogue.
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| mary rosenblum | As we all know, Jim, we're on our way to the Kirian galaxy with a load of precious swirmze vaccine...
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| mary rosenblum | Well..ahem..if we all know it, why does anyone have to SAY it?
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| mary rosenblum | If you have a complex alien or exotic setting it is often worth your while to figure out how to work a naive character into that plot!
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| mary rosenblum | They can be worth their weight in gold!
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| mary rosenblum | Hey, how come it looks like that? Naive Character asks. What happens if I touch that?
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| mary rosenblum | A naive kid character can steal the show. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | But someone who doesn't know any more than the reader does is a great way to fill the reader in as the knowlegible characters educate the naive.
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| mary rosenblum | BUT of course...that character needs to be an integral part of the plot.
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| mary rosenblum | Remember that plots are not cast in stone.
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| mary rosenblum | If your characters all know the world too well, they'll be terrible informants for us readers.
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| mary rosenblum | Find a reason to turn one of 'em into an outsider.
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| mary rosenblum | She's a cousin of one of the regulars, dragged along because her parents are dead.
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| mary rosenblum | He's a relative from out of town and Mom said the gang had to take him along on their expedition.
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| mary rosenblum | Just avoid the tempation to simply tell the readers what you want them to know.
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| mary rosenblum | Every time your voice intrudes in the story, you remind the reader that it is not real...that they are sitting on the sofa, not living your world.
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| info | Isn't there a way to still inform the reader without using the naive character? Something like 'I hope we can get this medicine to that sector in time.'
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| mary rosenblum | YOu can do that info, but you have to ask yourself just how those knowing characters would say it...or it will sound SO phony.
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| mary rosenblum | You son might say, "Can I borrow the car tonight?"
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| mary rosenblum | If he sys
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| mary rosenblum | If he says, 'Can I borrow the Toyota tonight and all you have is one car and it's the Toyota...
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| mary rosenblum | well, why would he say that?
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| mary rosenblum | So our crew might say, I hope we make it in time.
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| mary rosenblum | Your task is to let the reader realize that the reason is the vaccine.
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| mary rosenblum | So how to do it?
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| mary rosenblum | Well, someone could talk about the rumors that person heard about the nasty symptoms of this plague..
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| mary rosenblum | Readers ARE willing to work a bit and they can be good guessers if you give good clues.
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| mary rosenblum | Or someone can simply say...What if the vaccine doesn't work?"
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| mary rosenblum | In thoughts, too, we often think 'indirectly' about things.
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| mary rosenblum | Sally might not think, My boss is a butt. She knows he's a butt...why even think it?
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| mary rosenblum | BUT...she might think, 'what is the old goat going to get on me about today?
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| mary rosenblum | If the old goat is her boss, we have a pretty clear idea of what she thinks of him.
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| mary rosenblum | As you write dialogue or thoughts ask yourself...would I REALLY say that?
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| mary rosenblum | And if you find yourself earnestly talking yourself into a yes, just delete it. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | If the yes comes easy, you're fine, but too often we'd like someone to say or think that to make our lives easier, but we know a real person probably wouldn't.
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| mary rosenblum | Well, we're about at the end of our Oregon hour. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | Do drop into our casual chats.
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| mary rosenblum | No topic at those...we talk about whatever. And have the occasional food fight. :-)
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| mary rosenblum | Great place to brainstorm stories, too.
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| mary rosenblum | Very helpful crowd.
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| mary rosenblum | They take place M, W, F at 10 AM Pacific, 11 MT, 12 Central, and 1 pm east coast.
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| mary rosenblum | Sundays, we gather at 5 PM pacific, 6 pm Mt, 7 pm central,and 8 pm east coast.
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| arfelin | Thanks for another forum of fun and info Mary! Have a nice weekend!
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| info | thanks again for helping with putting namebrands into stories the other day. It was very helpful.
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| mary rosenblum | You're welcome info...and since you brought it up...
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| mary rosenblum | It's a good point to make.
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| mary rosenblum | Info queried me about using the name of a particular brand of cat food in a positive way in a story.
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| mary rosenblum | While it's technically not legal to use a brand name, they're not going to sue or send a cease and desist letter.
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| mary rosenblum | BUT...my caveat was this.
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| mary rosenblum | When you use a specific...brand, song, movie...
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| mary rosenblum | and your reader HATES that brand, song, movie...you have alienated your reader.
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| mary rosenblum | If SHE likes THAT brand, I can't respect her!
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| mary rosenblum | So if you can avoid that sort of specific brand/movie/song I would.
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| mary rosenblum | It's not a big deal, but it's something to keep in mind.
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| mary rosenblum | I'll post the transcript of this session at Writing Craft: Forum Transcript .
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| mary rosenblum | Have a good weekend, all!
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