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We Let Strangers In: Internet Bullies

Have you ever been in a situation where you have given your opinion on something based on your knowledge and expertise only to be shot down by one ignorant fool? Have you ever had that experience on social media? And have you ever found that when you chose to ignore the ignorant fool on social media that they kept coming after you—attacking your character? And, to top off the whole experience, did you need a friend to step in and handle it, for fear that you would just explode on public channels?

I would be surprised if I encountered anyone savvy with the social media world who hasn't experience the troll attack at least once. It seems like a rite of passage to the internet world. For the most part, we're able to ignore the trolls, because they're after some strange definition of self-gratification, enjoying taking everyone else down into the dark hole of hell. But what if the troll is actually a stranger that we have openly let into our lives, influencing us?

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The Traditional 3-Act Structure: Part 2

Much of what a writer does when crafting a story is based on instinct, weaving in the rise and fall of action. But when looking at story structure specifically, one need to recognize that every story is different. There is no strict formula that can be applied.

Tools like the traditional 3-act structure are only diagnostic tools, designed to help us understand why something might not be working.

In the first post of this Traditional 3-Act Structure series, we introduced the importance of this structure as a whole, and began breaking it down. We looked at the first act (The Setup) and the first point of No-Return. Today, let's get into the nitty-gritty of Act 2.

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The Traditional 3-Act Structure: Part 3

There is a natural instinct that exists among most writers about where to put the tension beats in, where things need to change, and when the reader needs a break from all the action. That is because most writers read a lot, or watch a lot of movies, or... Well, we just spend a lot of time in a fictional world somewhere. When we do that, we start to see the patterns, even if we don't understand the formula being applied to those stories.

The traditional 3-act structure is just one of countless number of models out there on story structure. Over the past few posts, we have been breaking down the traditional 3-act structure into the nitty-gritty, getting to the root of why it works the way it does.

In Part 1 of this series, we examined the elements of act 1, including the inciting event and the first transition point, what I called the first point of No-Return. In Part 2, we looked at the first half of act 2, heading into the midpoint, and we discussed what is meant by the A-story and the B-story.

In the final installment of this series, we're going to look at the final transition point for the manuscript and what the working components go into act 3.

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Writing Accent into Fictional Writing

You have a character that comes from a particular region of the world. The people from this region tend to speak in a particular fashion. It's distinctive, and the moment anyone hears it, they instantly get a sense of the type of environment that the character came from.

It's only natural to want to put that into our writing. We want to immerse our readers into the world. We want them to experience it. Being able to imagine a character's accent is only part of that experience.

However, building accent into the written form is not a simple matter of slapping a few letters onto the page. Like everything else we do in writing, it takes careful thought and consideration.

Writing accent into your story could add the perfect color to your fictional world, but it could also turn into a reader's nightmare.

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The Long or the Short of a Story

The length of a story has more impact on the nature of a story than people realize.  In a previous post, I wrote about how there is a minimum number of words necessary to do a story justice. This is particularly the case when working in the short story form. However, what many writers don't realize is that the length of the story will help to define the expectations of a reader when it comes to world building, character development and pacing. There will also be a literary expectation imposed by word counts.

With the publishing industry, you have six broad categories for story length: flash fiction, short stories, novelette, novella, short novel and long novel.

It's time to get down to the nitty-gritty and explain the difference between these different categories and the reader expectations involved.

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