We are halfway through November, which means, if you are doing NaNoWriMo (writing a novel during the National Novel Writing Month of November), you should have at least 25,000 words on the page by now. How are you doing? Ahead of schedule? Behind? Hopelessly flailing or flying along?
Themes enhance stories, making them more meaningful. It’s theme that makes a story linger in your memory. It’s theme that provides the touchstone for what happens. It’s what informs everything that follows the opening sequence. Themes matter to the story and your writing. But most of all, theme matters to your characters.
The first moments of your script or novel matter. They set up what is to follow and hook the audience. Or they don’t.
The best film openings establish tone, settings, and character. They establish context for what will follow or establish expectations that will be thwarted later on. They do more than simply open the film. They start the story and grab the audience.
How you start your script or screenplay matters. These opening scenes establish an expectation and either appeal or repel an audience. What a film shows in the first five minutes is critical to how an audience will react, how engaged they become, and how long they will sit watching your story unfold.
The opening shot is your chance to hook them. It’s the first exchange of information. The first connection. How you approach that is everything.
Scenes make up stories. They are the building blocks that form narrative. As writers, we stack scenes together to tell a particular tale. How we write, build, and stack those scenes matters.
You’ve finished your project and hit send. Then you notice an error. It’s the worst feeling when you find the mistake after submission. Those tiny errors haunt writers, which is why proofreading is an essential step for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve written an email, presentation or novel. It needs to be error-free.
Editing can be fun, but it also can be tough. It’s an emotional phase of the writing process that can batter a writer’s spirit. Not all of the time. There will be projects that are easy to write and edit, but I’m not talking about those projects today. Today I’m talking about those larger beasts that tear at a writer’s soul. The projects that make us question whether we can write and why we want to do this in the first place. Those projects are the ones that test our resolve to write.
I am often asked to critique my friends’ work. I consider it an occupational hazard. Of course, I also offer manuscript critiques as part of my business. I enjoy doing them, but recognize they can present a few challenges and always proceed with caution.
In the last blog we defined throughlines, loglines and taglines. Now let’s look closer at throughlines—the most important of the three.
The throughline is a single thread that winds through your story and off which everything else hangs. It drives the writing and organizes the plot, action and character development. The throughline is the main motivation driving the protagonist toward the ending. It is what holds your story together so it can be a story instead of a random collection of anecdotes and scenes. A good throughline is how you propel your story forward in a way that makes sense.
The last blog outlined nine signs of amateur writing and how to fix them. This blog continues that list with another nine ways new writers show their inexperience.
Here is the second set of nine signs of amateur writers and how to fix them:
Writing is a skill. It takes time to master. That doesn’t mean you can’t earn a living writing before you achieve an expert level, but you will need to refine your skills to have a career.
Here are 9 signs of amateur writing and how to avoid them: