For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they’re all doing. Nancy Kress Read Quote
In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn’t initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him. Nancy Kress Read Quote
Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an ‘Airedale,’ not just a ‘dog.’ A taste should not be merely ‘good’ but ‘creamy and sweet’ or ‘sharply salty’ or ‘buttery on the tongue.’ Nancy Kress Read Quote
Words change over time. ‘Condescending,’ for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen’s world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment. Nancy Kress Read Quote
Words that add no new information or aren’t repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat. Nancy Kress Read Quote
There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don’t know any of these writers. Nancy Kress Read Quote
All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between ‘reality’ and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it’s not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition. Nancy Kress Read Quote
Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) – except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting. Nancy Kress Read Quote
The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life. Nancy Kress Read Quote
You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what’s gone before. Nancy Kress Read Quote
