Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress
Nancy Anne Kressis an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which she later expanded into a novel with the same title. She has also won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2013 for "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall", and in 2015 for "Yesterday's Kin"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth20 January 1948
CountryUnited States of America
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In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn't initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him.
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Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.
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The climax is the place where the opposing forces in your story finally clash. This is true whether those opposing forces are two armies or two values inside a character's soul.
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Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.
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It's very hard to write a story with only one character. This is because readers want to see your protagonist interacting with others. We come to know people through their interpersonal relations. Even Jack London, in his classic short story 'To Build A Fire,' gave his lone Arctic explorer a dog so that the character would have someone to talk to.
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Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
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The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.'
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Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
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As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.
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Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.
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The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.
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The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
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A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That's the reason it is called an 'Epilogue'; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story.
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Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.