Recent content by bdcharles

I agree. However I wonder sometimes if when people suggest that some writing is "too passive" they mean the below. I think that because I see far more of the below than passive voice. Again I agree. I think writing in the passive voice can actually lend a certain gravitas to the prose. But...

Well if it is a learning novel, then you have to put your learnings into practise now, not just in the next WIP. There are options, though some are more workable than others. He could become the villain, but that would be a significant rewrite for you - not unachievable though; and your good...

I do think that there is a bit of an argument for using such a passive construct as this. It's about what is being centre-staged. What's the main thing here - the city, or those who knew it by another name? If it is the city, it might throw readers off by then invoking some other group whose...

Is there much use for this stuff in the armed fores? :O Maybe for a rousing after-dinner speech in the officers' mess. :)

I have a creeping suspicion that there are two understandings of what passive voice is. One is the traditional, gramatically correct one where rather than a subject doing a verb to an object, a subject has verb done to it by an object. So the subject is the thing acted upon, not the thing...

I have a prophecy in my WIP. To really bed the cliche down it concerns the dwarves. But - it turns out to have been a piece of nonsense written by a rather whimsical journalist to stir them in to actions that she, the journalist, hopes will make her rich.

Use that voice in a character - and then kill them off. Wonderfully therapeutic :)

Sounds great! But my more pressing question is: how did you create that map?

I don't mind deep thoughts in fantasy but I think writers need to watch for overdoing it, otherwise readers may feel relentlessly pinned to someone's head and trapped with their mundanest of thoughts. When close up in this POV be aware that any fast narrative may be bogged right down, or that...

Hi FatCat. What things do you think about? What do you regret? What are the contents of your daydreaming? Take those day-to-day things that bang about in your head and put them to words. Resolve them there, play them out the way you wished they had gone, and if you can dress them up in fantasy...

Personally I go the gibberish route. Sometimes, of course, coming up with the right bit of gibberish can be a bit tricky - it may sound "not quite right", so you have to know how to get your mind in the right condition to come up with stuff. Meditation can help, as can some absorbing task like...

I suppose it depends on how big a plot device they are, and where they fit in the suspension of disbelief spectrum. With the doorway to Narnia, it was never a straightforward matter of just waltzing on in there and bang, you're in Narnia. Sometimes it didn't work, time went funny, it was a...

Ah, this is a great question! I think setup is key, but as you say, excessive infodumping can kill a story. So a good way, in my view, is to just give things a little precedent, almost a throwaway vignette - so let's say a character overhears someone say "Yeah, I got whipped, but, you know, the...

The thing about specific units of pain is that even if you make some up, and scale it and everything, people might buy into it but they won't feel any fear at the idea - because it doesn't exist. It may feel rather dry and abstract. You have to dramatise to traumatise - so your guy might be able...

Well, I don't want other fantasy writers to break with these cliches because I want to be the one to do it! ;) I suppose a portal is a bit of a lazy device. Why not invent some interesting way for your characters to get from A to B? I tend to sympathise with alot of these points. Dwarves is...