Writing Fiction

[poliphilo]

I love writing the crisis of a story. I find it just tumbles out onto the page. Fights, chases, emotional confrontations- brilliant!

Writing the build-up to crises is also fun, but more time-consuming.

Description is hard work. Descriptive passages can easily become boring to the reader. You've got to select the details that count. And cut and cut and cut.

I love writing dialogue. At times it's like you're channeling the characters. They run ahead of you and come up with all sorts of things that take you by surprise.

Revision is the worst. I spent hours this morning smoothing out transitions and filling out descriptions in the latest installment of purchas
I could have roughed out an entire action sequence in the time it took me to fettle one short, scene-setting paragraph.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I keep coming back to Chekhov. Some aspiring writer had presented him with pages and pages describing a moonlit evening and Chekhov said, "scrub it all and just tell us how the moon looks when it's reflected in a piece of broken glass."

I find I get hooked up for hours on tiny, insignificant, questions of grammar.