Satima's LJ - Displacement Activity

Satima, go and reread that scene you wrote of where whats-her-name gets flogged by the evil prince.

Now if you can get that amount of feeling, of connection between reader and character, of emotion, into every scene you write, you're cooking.

Make scenes immediate. Choose a pov and write as if you were them experiencing the scene. Don't describe whole events (such as a dinner at which things are said, a journey, etc) in a single paragraph. Jump from event to event. Make sure that when you write, you always make sure the reader knows where the pov character is at that moment

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Many thanks for the encouragement, Patty:-) Now and again I get it right - or nearly right - but I don't actually understand the nuts and bolts of how I do it. Hopefully, it can be learnt and hopefully I'm not too stupid to learn, if a little slow! Forex, when you say "jump from event to event" what do you mean?

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AAARRGH!!!

I wrote a massive reply to this, tried to post it, LJ wouldn't and now it's GONE (beats head against wall).

Basically, what I mean with 'jump from event to event' is that at least 90% of the text should be real-time events.

Think for example of a bar fight.

Three people get arrested by the police and have to give a statement of their version of events. Those statements will go something like: 'we met this group on the train and they were making lewd comments about my girlfriend. And then when we got to the bar, we met them again...' Stuff like that.

In real-time, you would show us the first meeting, in the train, and let us hear exactly what is being said as it is being said. Then we'd skip to the next scene, which finds the people in the bar, also in real time where you let us hear the music, and feel the heat and the emotion.

In writing, we don't want any police reports.

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Just had another look on your other blog (I really should get a blogspot account, but I find I'm hard-pressed to keep up with just this one), and I really, really liked Glenda's advice. Although once you start revising, you obviously can't forget the overall plot, when you're writing a draft, you can. Because (and I've detailed this a bit in the last month or so) you can write a perfectly exciting book without the faintest clue what it is about. That information (albeit important) takes up no more than 5% of your word count. Most of it is within-scene tension, and for that, scenes need to be 'live' and not told.

I'm going to make post about this sort of thing in a minute.

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It might be worth having a blogspot a/c just so you can a) post conveniently to blogs there and b)point people to your "real" blog. In other words, exactly the reverse of what I do. Blogger also has the advantage of belonging to Google, so you're immediately picked up by the search engine, even if you don't use tags.

Yes, Glenda's advice is very good and very timely. I've printed it out to try after a bit of break from the monster. Thanks for clarifying your "jump" terminology, too:-)

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I think I can already comment easily on blogspot sites. I'm not entirely sure that being listed on Google is an advantage, although my blog probably already is. I don't really want to have two blogs unless they're different, and seeing as I have no professional writerly credits as yet, may hold off until such time (keeps fingers crossed).

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