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Showing posts from April, 2016

Show me, don't tell me.

Image
I don't own this picture, but there's a whole story written in those shoes. I was an English major in college, but I actually suck at punctuation. My editor has taught me more about the rules for punctuation than any teacher in sixteen years of education ever did. Screenwriting taught me how to pare things down to their most visual elements, and to write action scenes with active words. There's a set up to every scene, just so we know who's there and what they're doing, but the story is told through the dialogue between characters. Time spent a character's head does NOT translate into something visible on screen. In my books, its my job to paint the visual picture with words. I need to show readers what my characters see and do with active words that allow the reader to be there with them, and then whenever possible, let interactions with other characters give voice to the narrator's observations. For example, in an early (unedited) scene from Cheat