I finally had my short story critiqued by someone who knows how to write novels, and well… He said I have a good story and did my conversational text well, but my story was doing a lot of TELL and not SHOW in many places. I knew about this concept but somehow I was blind to it until Drew went through it with me and showed me where I was doing it and how I could make it better. Now it seems so obvious to me. I am surprised how I didn’t realize it before.
So this week I did some major revisions to “Shattered Worlds”. I added a lot more character dialog to replace the boring telling I had let creep into the text. I added more physical description of character actions SHOWING what they were feeling and pulled out the plopping down of overt motivations and emotions which I was just TELLING the reader.
I am sure it is not done yet, but I am feeling a lot better about it now, and I think this short advice that Drew gave me really brought some new life to my story. Really appreciate your “brutal review” @drewwagar.
Month: March 2019
Shattered Worlds
I have my short story of about 10,000 words into the secondish draft editing phase. My little sci-fi story will be a part of an anthology book project which Drew Wagar started on his twitch creative stream.
His stream started last year with him teaching us the basics of writing a novel and getting it published. After a few months he had the idea that his stream followers might like to participate with a real writing project and proposed we collaborate on an anthology that we could have published on Amazon as a digital and paperback. We have 8 or 9 new and experienced authors participating. We spent a few months designing an overall backstory and Star System where our tales will take place.
So hopefully by Next December we will have an actual book published!
if you are interested in reading about Drew… here are some links:
Drew’s Website:
http://www.drewwagar.com
Our Twitch stream project:
https://www.twitch.tv/drewwagar/