Tag: Jack Smith

Guest Post by Jack Smith

Fiction depends on tension.  Tension—a felt response to conflict—must be heightened as well as diminished in a literary work.  Where this is accomplished depends on the nature of the plot and the character arc.  While tension is created by practically every story element, pacing is largely a result of style and narrative technique.  The pacing of a work affects the tension but also creates mood and tone.   In every fictional work you write, you must decide on both tension and pacing.  While much of this may be a matter of intuition and feel, you can also plan out matters of tension and pacing as you write and revise your work.   This amounts to a six-stage process.

I. Decide on the nature of the tension in your story or novel. Basically there are three major types of fictional works according to tension.
A. The five-stage plot structure, where tension must be gradually (though not continuously) increased to the story’s crisis and climax, followed by falling action and denouement.
B. The epiphany story where tension gradually builds toward a final, rather sudden, clarifying vision, on the part of the protagonist.
C. The story where tension builds at times, is released, or partly released, but does not build toward a climax at the end—but rather closes with the protagonist’s psychological distillation of several bumps along the way, no one bump necessarily involving more tension than the others.
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Guest Post by Jack Smith

When you write and revise your fiction, you deal with a host of problems.  With some novels, it’s hard to decide on the right point of view.  With others, it’s a struggle to work out the plot.  Sometimes it’s a matter of getting the language down just right.  Of course it’s one thing to spot a problem, another to fix it.  Consider the following ten rather typical problems most fiction writers face—and some possible fixes.

1. A dull character

Perhaps in the abstract one can sympathize or empathize with your character’s ambitions, needs, desires, plight, etc., but when it comes down to the writing itself, the character is flat-out dull, vacuous—bearing nothing distinctly human.   If this is the case, you need to individualize your character by including:Continue reading

Guest Post by Jack Smith

Revising a novel often calls for a bit of pruning.  Some material must undoubtedly go, anything that doesn’t contribute pretty directly to the plot and your protagonist’s overall arc.  If it’s material you feel pretty ho-hum about, good—it’s gone.  You’re happy to see it go.  But if you feel really invested in it, and you’ve done a lot of work on it, then cutting it can be something of a heart-breaker.  You hesitate.  Should you?

What kinds of material?   The following are some candidates for pruning:Continue reading