Tag: Fiction
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The F Words: The Fear of F
In an earlier blog I wrote about The Power of F. But now I want to write about a subject that strikes me as very sad: the fear of F. Back in 2020, after City of Light offered me a publishing contract for The F Words, my editor and I discussed the title. Our first…
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The F Words: Quoting Myself
Authors are often called upon to come up with quotes. This is especially true if somebody (a fellow author, an institution, a journal of some kind) wants a testimonial or a capsule summary of something. I have often given such quotes, which are usually pithy (50 words or so) statements about whatever the subject matter…
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The F Words: The Freedom of Silence
For many writers, possibly most, the second chapter of a book is a big problem. One of the main reasons for this problem is that writers spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting their first chapters, this in order to grab an editor’s attention and make a sale. After all that energy and rewriting, one…
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The F Words: Dialogue
Most readers love dialogue, probably because it reveals something happening in “real time.” That is, the action is on the page, rather than being relayed by a narrator as having happened. Dialogue isn’t “having happened,” it’s happening. Right now, as the reader sees the words. Also, I suspect that some readers (I’m one of them)…
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The F Words: Friendship
A friend is a close companion: a person we confide in, are intimate with, play with, work with, and associate with on a regular basis. Life without friendship would be very lonely. Friends help us look at things in a different way. They’re there when we need somebody by our side. They give, they share,…
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The F Words: Humor
I’m a person with a sense of humor, and I enjoy humor in writing. Not insulting humor, and I’m not a big fan of slapstick humor. The types of humor I enjoy when I’m reading a book are: the unexpected happenswitty self-deprecationsituational humorunderstatementhyperbole (overstatement/exaggeration) The use of humor is a literary tool, just as the…
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The Importance of Pace
Just as a walking pace consists of the speed, the length of stride, and even the rhythm with which one walks, so in fiction pace consists of the speed with which a story moves, the amount of action, and the rhythm with which scene and summary follow one another. Long paragraphs filled with long sentences…
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The Maybe-Reliable Narrator
In fiction the narrator is the person or persons who tells the story. This could be a character in the story, or the narrative could come from somebody who is not in the story — a voice that the author chooses to write in. The Fiction Dictionary defines narrator as “the consciousness that tells the…
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Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Part II
Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel was somewhat easy to write, probably because I had been thinking about it for three years. Some chapters took me a day to write, some two or three days. I went at it steadily, so that I would never lose touch with the purpose of the book and the…
Barbara Gregorich 