Recent content by Penpilot

Anything I say will be pretty arbitrary. Some short stories aren't even five pages long. For me, since short stories are... well... short, I'll read until it makes my eyes roll, but otherwise, if it's just a vanilla story, I'll go to the end to see if there's a nice pay off. Sometimes there is...

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this point. But as for the other aspects, I think almost any opening scenario can be made interesting if approached correctly. As mentioned, emotion is key. Finding that emotional 'in' that will connect character to reader is part of what will make or...

Without the prologue, there's something lost, but that doesn't change the fact that the execution is part of everyday, "normal", life. As for removing the execution, to do that you'd have to rewrite the whole chapter, not just simply decide not include it. So it's not the same thing. The...

Let me try to tap dance around this a little. It is, from my perspective, still a typical day-in-the-life. Yes, it's a more interesting day--which is probably a good place to start--but it's still representative of what normal life is like for House Stark. A child of House Stark witnessing an...

One of the things the first act to a story is supposed to do is show the reader what life is typically like for protagonist before the story world takes over. It depends on your character and what's 'normal' for them, so doing typical mundane things wouldn't be out of the question if your...

Whatever scene I'm working on currently. :p For me, it's always about finding the right emotional struggle in the scene and finding the right way to advance that naturally without it feeling like I'm beating the reader over the head with a blunt object. So that can be any type of scene, fight...

Things like this are like the pirate code. What ever works, but using the seven scene short story format is about the same as choosing an arbitrary word count. My scenes typically go between 1500-2500 words, so seven scenes could easily go beyond 10000 words under the right circumstance...

The ending was far from the best thing in the movie. It was IMHO a case of the need for spectacle overshadowing a very important theme of the movie. To me it was a 7.5 out of 10. I'm not sure how intentional it was, but I saw a lot of echoes from the Captain America movie in this.

Of course it's plausible. Soldiers feel guilt. Policemen feel guilt. And normal every day people would feel guilt. At the end of the day, one person ended another person's life. And if a person dwelled on it they would start to wonder if there wasn't another way.

Didn't Citizen Kane start with the protagonist dying? Any way, there are plenty of stories that start that way. Don't worry about if it's been done before, just do it well and you'll be fine.

Since I decided to start taking writing more seriously, I've only had one period where I couldn't write. And that was because health problems made it so I couldn't look at a computer screen for more than a few minutes without going buggy-eyed. Any way after about 6 months, the health issue...

Prologues are tools. There's a right time to use them and a wrong time. IMHO a prologue should not be an info dump. This instance I think is what turns people off. Prologues should give insight and add something to the story that normally would not be there if left unread. For example...

I was just thinking. This is kind of like when people read a book or see a movie and point out all the flaws and rough patches and say it would have been better if the writer had done X instead of Y. A lot of people do this and some can do it quite well, but ask those same people to come up...

Yep. No use fussing about things until you're sure it's worth fussing about.

What are you trying to convey with that sentence? If it's just that her fingers are numb because it's cold, then IMHO keep it simple. Butterfly's suggestion of "Her numb fingers gripped the tree." does the job just fine.