story craft #4 Flashbang

Mike Grist Stories, Story Craft 7 Comments

I’ve been told I sometimes write in a flashbang style. This has manifested itself in several kinds of feedback- – I can’t read for more than 10 minutes at a time. It’s exhausting. – Some of the sequences left me really feeling the pain the main character felt. – Stop hurting him and give him some happy times. So what is flashbang? I can think of two corollaries. One- Michael Bay. *shudders*. Two- an overexcited American teenage girl delivering just a little content with a lot of verby enthusiasm- ‘so like, there was us two guys, and oh my gosh, …

story craft #3 Bad Guy Motives

Mike Grist Stories, Story Craft Leave a Comment

Last week I talked about character motivation– filling in the gaps between what characters want and why. It`s a fundamental part of story architecture- that the good guy wants something and will fight to get it. But probably more important than what the good guy wants is what the bad guy wants. That`s what I was thinking about when I started this latest round of Dawn redrafts *. What do bad guys want? It`s the keystone of story architecture, because the bad guy- – drives the story – creates the conflict – causes the wrongs the good guy has to …

story craft #2 Filling in the Motivation Gaps

Mike Grist Story Craft 4 Comments

Last week I talked about the DM’s screen, and how I’d written chunks of story with other chunks missing. Now I’m rewriting the first Dawn book with that in mind. I’m about 30 pages in so far, and no section has escaped either strong editing or a complete rewrite. As I read closely what I wrote in 1st draft, I see the biggest DM screen error is probably this- character motivation. Largely it’s missing. And I try to consider the effect this will have on the first-time reader coming cold to my work. They have no reason to ‘help out’ …

story craft #1 The Dungeon Master’s Screen

Mike Grist Story Craft Leave a Comment

I`m still working on my Dawn* books. I`ve sent them out to agents and got no`s so far in reply. So I`m trying to make them better. Here`s some of the feedback I got from readers: – I didn`t know what was going on. – The writing is too dense and descriptive in parts, I just skip over it. – Who are all these people, and what do they look like? These are all kind of the same thing. I know it, too, and knew it when I was writing the book. I wanted to get into some action, dialogue, …