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Your Story’s Time Line: Cut It Up
A story’s timeline is a funny thing because you can play with it–chop it up and move pieces around–and the audience can still figure out what happened. Mysteries are particularly good about this because there are, in fact, two time lines: there’s the timeline of what happened and the timeline of the detective figuring out…
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Enrich a Story Plot
Last week I was wondering if I could combine two plots into one. One idea was for an Event and one for Characters. While I still think they could have meshed, the character story took off on it’s own into a short story. Now the question is what to do with the Event idea, how…
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Fatal Backstory
“She stopped and remembered her home town and how it felt to be ten years old when she moved. . .” I checked out two books-on-tape yesterday and tried to listen to them. The first one started at a certain point, then immediately went into a flashback, within the first page. Ditto for the second.…
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Backstory’s Emotional Weight
When we invent characters, we need to know all about them, including where they grew up, childhood fears & dreams and more. Where does this information go? Where do you put all this backstory? Backstory’s Emotional Weight Two friends, writing vastly different stories, are struggling with backstory. One is adding backstory to enrich the story…