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Storytelling: Do You Remember The Ripple Effect?

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Eight years ago I wrote a blog titled “The Ripple Effect in Storytelling.” Recently, I was reading a novel by a seasoned author who failed to remember the ripple effect. It was so disconcerting, I not only stopped reading the novel, I also decided it was time I revisited the topic. What’s the ripple effect, you ask? It’s the consequences that ripple out from story action. Imagine a pebble tossed into a pond, it hits the water and then ever widening ripples reach out to touch more area than the pebble itself touched. Instead of a pebble, think of a story element. For example, your main character is hiking through the woods and trips over a log and injures a shoulder. From that point forward, the injured shoulder must be included with that character until such time as the shoulder has healed. The hurt shoulder is the pebble. Rippling out from that injury are consequences: the pain, inability to use the shoulder as one should, wearing a brace, or other characters remarking on the inju
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Website 101: Storyboarding (Part Two)

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In part one of this discussion, we looked at why a writer needs a website even if he or she is unpublished. You’ve hopefully answered two basic question: the purpose of your website and who you hope will visit. Now we’re going to discuss storyboarding, which I think is a great writing tool. Storyboarding and Websites While storyboarding is traditionally associated with films, it is also popular in the world of web design. Just think of storyboarding as a management tool that facilitates the creative thinking process and you’ll see why it’s useful in a variety of endeavors. Its primary appeal is that it allows for thoughts to be captured on paper (and writers love paper, right?), which can be spread out as one works on a project. For a writer, this can mean using lists, graphs, boxes with text, images, or illustrations. You don’t need to be an artist–believe me I’m not one–to storyboard. All you need is paper, pencil, and imagination to determine the content of your website. To keep thi
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Website 101 (Part 1)

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Some writers use only social media to connect with readers, but most social media is a superficial system of communication filled with brief posts or videos. It’s good to be connected with readers via social media, but social media has its limitations. Most importantly, the user forfeits control over their content which can be lost when the company changes policies. If you’re serious about your writing career, build a website. Websites are all about content, much of it written. Lucky for us, writers are all about writing. We’re a natural fit with websites. Website design is about putting together the content in a visually pleasing way. If you’re published, you have the written content or descriptions of your stories, so you have text. As for visual content, you have book covers. If you’re unpublished, nothing is stopping you from creating an informative website. Why does an unpublished author need a website? It’s the best way to ensure you own your domain name. Many website buil
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Finding the Write Fit

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You may or may not recognize the actor Burt Reynolds who was a celebrity icon in the 20th century. If Smokey and the Bandit rings any bells, then you probably remember Burt Reynolds. A former high school and college football player, Burt often did his own stunts while making a movie. During the filming of City Heat, Burt was hit in the jaw with a metal chair while filming a fight scene. The stuntman who played the assailant grabbed the metal chair instead of grabbing the breakaway chair. Burt spent the next two years in agony with constant vertigo and difficulty chewing food. Searching for a diagnosis and cure, he saw forty doctors. He was diagnosed with temporomandibular disorder (aka TMJ dysfunction) which can cause pain in the jaw joint and the muscles that control jaw movement. The problem was figuring out how to fix it. Not much was known about the issue then, but basically he needed extensive reconstructive jaw surgery. Finding a doctor willing to undertake the surgery wasn’t
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When a Novel Becomes a Screenplay

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How do you tell if your story has too much dialogue? This question was posed to me by an attendee at one of my Zoom writing presentations. It’s a good question and like a good question it nagged me far longer than the answer I gave that day. Finding the right balance between narrative and dialogue is a challenge. Too much dialogue and you’re writing a screenplay. Too much narrative and sleep overpowers the reader. Balancing dialogue with narrative reminds me of advice a commercial printer gave me: white space is good in a newsletter. (I’ve written a lot of newsletters in my day.) He said pages need to be a balancing act between text, images, and white space to keep the reader engaged. Although I don’t use images in my fiction, I found this concept–balancing dialogue and narrative–works for stories, too. Caveat: I read and write for entertainment so my opinion is shaded toward commercial (read for pleasure) fiction more than literary (usually designed to make the reader sad. I
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The Beat Goes On and On and On…Writing Fiction Dialogue

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As I mentioned in my previous blog, the word beat has a cornucopia of meanings. For me, the definition of beat offered in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers , by Renni Browne and Dave King, makes the most sense. They defined beat as a descriptive sentence or sentences inserted before, after, or during the dialogue section. Keep in mind, it is not a dialogue tag such as “said,” that establishes who is talking. Instead, a beat comes into play after the reader knows who is talking and describes a character’s response or action. If dialogue is the audio, think of beat as the video. Renni Browne and Dave King go one step further by saying a beat is the “literary equivalent of what is known in the theater as stage business.” I love this definition because stage business refers to physical actions made by an actor on stage such as tucking a tendril of hair behind an ear. You see stage business all the time in plays, movies, and television shows. If you have trouble visualizing this conce
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The Beat Goes On: Writing Fiction Dialogue

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When I aspired to become a published writer, I didn’t know the “writing experts” used different definitions of the same words and phrases. Or that their definitions wouldn’t always be listed in a normal dictionary. Beat is one such word. If you check a dictionary, you’ll find an extensive list of definitions. Since I took lots of piano lessons as a kid, I tend to think of beat in relation to music. Like in maintaining the correct beat which had been hammered into me by several piano teachers. Thus, to me beat had to do with the tempo of a piece of music. The rhythm. During my journey to published novelist, I went down the screenwriting rabbit hole. Imagine my surprise to see the word beat used interchangeably with plot points and turning points. Then I read Robert McKee’s Story and he had yet another definition: “A beat is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction.” Oddly, I can’t find a dictionary that defines beat in any of those screenwriting terms. Frankly, none of the
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