We all have preferences for flow in a story. Let’s see what everyone thinks:
Greetings Storytellers, Diana here today with another . . . riveting piece of punctuation: the ellipsis! I thought this one was going to be easy . . …
Punctuation Part IV: Ellipsis (. . .)
Super Mario
(Long ago, I had the time and energy to play a bunch of video games. Probably wasn’t the biggest gamer, but I enjoyed the hobby. Now, I barely play unless my son is here, so all I have are the memories.)
I remember quests
Along the dangerous roads
Of many pixelated worlds
That was a click away
I walked with heroes
As they grew into their roles
And rid their world of evil
Fighting villains of great vision
I grafted these vast tales
Upon my deepest thoughts
Wanting them to stay
As I grew into older roles
These became the stories
That I dreamed of every night
Until they faded back
Coated by life’s winding path
These memories are not dead
They sleep beneath my skin
Easily stirred to mind
By half a melody
That calls it to my eyes
Edged with wanting tears
For the worlds I left behind
And may never play again
Keeping a story flowing is more difficult than people realize. In fact, I think there are multiple threats to this essential of storytelling. These are from my own experience, so I’m sure there are more.
Concurrent Adventures
This is when an author has multiple storylines happening at the same time. You can’t have them occurring at the same time on the same page, so you have to jump around. This can create a lot of jerky story flow. It’s inevitable to have a bit, so the goal with this issue is to reduce the breaking to a point where it’s tolerable. This means, you can’t spend too much time on one story unless the other is much less important. Even then, you can’t be away for too long or the tension creating for the ignored one will disappear. Try to create a pattern for jumping and use cliffhangers and temporary closure to make sure you aren’t creating loose threads.
Overuse of Cliffhangers
I know I just said to use cliffhangers, but there are limits. If you keep stopping with suspense and moving on, the audience will become numb. This creates a flow that repeatedly hits a wall and has to restart. So, you have to use them sparingly and as surprises. Keep in mind that I’m talking about big cliffhangers and not the mild ones you may find at the end of a chapter. There’s a difference between transitions and cliffhangers, which I should probably make a post about in the future.
Adding or Subtracting for Page or Word Count
Longer than I’ve been writing, people have noted which page and word counts constitute a novel, short story, or novella. So, an author aiming for one of those categories might pad or condense their story. If you add too much then you create a sluggish flow due to there being extraneous words and scenes. If you squeeze things together, the flow may seem rushed with minimal or no character development. The answer to this is to write the story as you see fit without focusing on size. Alterations can be made with editing, but you still risk this issue. Best to just write and see how it comes out.
Too Many Characters in the Spotlight
Similar to the multiple storyline issue, you can really mess up the flow if you have too many characters fighting for attention. I’ve run into this situation with my big casts and wanting to have everyone be noticed in every scene. The flow becomes a ping-pong ball getting launched from one paragraph to the other. My answer to this was accepting that not everyone character had to be present or active during a scene. So, someone characters might only say one line that was important or be noted as hanging around while others do the legwork. Having mild temperament characters that can be left in the background until needed helps here too.
Author Perception
This is a challenge to recognize. Basically, the author feels that the story is flowing really well, but it ends up being fractured for the reader. How could this happen? Well, the author knows the whole story on some level. They know where it’s going and what they want to do with it in some way. Their mind will fill in the gaps to make one think that the flow is perfect or at least steady. Best way to counter this is with beta readers or at least focusing on if things are connecting well while editing.
Hello, SE’ers! Welcome to a new series, where the authors at Story Empire will share some personal experiences they’ve had along their journeys. …
SE AUTHORS WEIGH IN – WORST REVIEW
I’m going to ruffle some feathers here. Only because I’ve met many parents who are determined to find the ‘why’. They want to know what made their children autistic. It can stem from:
Back when my son first became diagnosed as neurodivergent, I began reading up on autism. To be clear, he wasn’t officially diagnosed with it until he was entering 6th grade, but it was mentioned a lot. My research was mostly to see if he fit the criteria, but that’s when I learned about it being a spectrum and such. Understanding the habits and ways to help him when he was having rough moments became a top priority. I also got close to the edge of the ‘why’.
Now, it isn’t wrong to try and find out why your child has autism. There is a heavy lean towards it being genetic, but science is still looking into it. Unfortunately, this means many have stepped in to use autism as a scapegoat for their own ideas. The one I butted heads with a lot years ago was ‘vaccines cause autism’. The only studies that have ‘proven’ this have turned out to be faked or purposely manipulated to get the desired outcome, which isn’t science. Of course, you have frustrated and desperate parents who will latch onto anything to explain why their child is autistic and more difficult to raise than they wanted.
IMPORTANT: It isn’t wrong for a parent to get this desperate or frustrated, especially if they have a challenging autistic child. They are human and want explanations to help them through what they are dealing with. It can turn into wanting to blame someone for hurting their child, so things like vaccines, various foods, and some rather outlandish boogeymen get targeted. This doesn’t mean that the parent hates or lacks love towards their child. They do love the child and want them to flourish, but they are letting out their own anguish. It turns into a ‘I will not let this happen to someone else’s child’ situation as well.
One of the spiraling paths that this can take is the parent searching for a why and then wanting a ‘cure’. Even writing this makes my skin crawl because a ‘cure’ makes it sound like someone with autism has a disease. That’s not the case. Their brains are wired in a way that they perceive the world more differently than the rest of us. Yet, a child that is nonverbal and/or prone to violent outbursts can make a parent believe they are sick and need to be ‘cured’. This is why autism gets lumped in with mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar at times, which is wrong. Big difference between a mental illness and being neurodivergent.
Unfortunately, the quest for a ‘cure’ can be somewhat dangerous too. There is one theory that autism is created or at least made worse by heavy metals. It is thought that exposure to heavy metals during pregnancy or early years is a big contributing factor. Chelation is the procedure of injecting chemicals into a person to bind and remove heavy metals from their bodies. So, some parents will opt to do this to their autistic child even though there is no evidence that it will work and has extremely high risks such as kidney damage and heart failure. A terrifying result that parents who are only looking at the ‘cure’ possibility might not realize.
The only way to really handle autism is patience and getting your child as much help as possible. There are so many local and national programs out there that will give support for autistic children and adults. The earlier you start on getting your child the services they need, the faster they would progress towards gaining control. It’s not easy and can be painful at times, which is why the quiet and good times need to be cherished. Otherwise, you can fall down the rabbit hole of hunting for the ‘why’ and a ‘cure’ that doesn’t exist instead of utilizing services that can actually help.
Should a person NOT go looking into what causes autism? No because we all want to know what triggers this. Yet, everything out there is still being researched and very little is set in stone. So, you have to be careful about being drawn in by predatory theories that want nothing more than to get the creators money and attention.
To be clear, I’m talking about American sports here. I don’t know how it’s done in other countries, but it does seem like soccer doesn’t suffer from what I’m about . .
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To talk about.
Way back in December, I went to a NY Islanders game, which I haven’t done since I was a kid. This is hockey. I was ready for some exciting, nonstop action like I remembered from the past. They would be quick to get things moving after a penalty and make sure people don’t cool off. I mean, people are always cheering and excited at these games. I did hear that live football games have a lot of pauses for commercials and the baseball games I’ve been too can be a little slow. Yet, the former required a lot of set up and the latter is a fairly low action sport when compared to the constant movement of hockey players. So, how did it all go?
I couldn’t believe how often the action stopped to clean the ice, get some rest, or other things that I simply couldn’t understand. There would be an average of 2 minutes of action and then a long pause. I guess it was to get a bunch of commercials in on the television, but that didn’t give me any solace. Didn’t help that the team I wanted to win was getting their butts kicked. Even if I wanted the agony to end quickly, it felt like the experience was designed to drag on for reasons beyond the actual game. The flow of action was so jerky that it took a lot of effort to not pull out my phone and catch Pokemon instead. Think I did do that near the end.
This also got me thinking about writing a story. There should be pauses between action scenes, but not to the point where it’s like stop-and-go traffic. You also need something interesting to happen for the entire audience during the lulls. Write stories more like soccer where there aren’t many full stops of the action and the slowdowns still have some game progress. Not like the sports that will take a sudden break and not show anything happening to those watching in person. It risks losing the audience and having to struggle to get them back.
Now, a big difference is that those at a sporting event can do other things. Talk with others, get food, hit the bathroom, throw things at the other team to get kicked out (you know which fandoms do this), or just stretch your legs. You paid a lot for that ticket and are kind of there, so you feel much more obligated to stay. There’s also an understanding by many that this happens, which is why you have people launching shirts into the crowd and mascots doing stuff. Guess this does mean that there is some action even though it isn’t the actual game.
Stories don’t have this benefit. A reader can take a break to do those other things, but they aren’t doing it because the story stopped. It’s usually a need and they plan on going back to the story if it hasn’t lost them. If there is this kind of pause and the person walks away from the book, it’s more likely that they won’t come back. Not unless they are the types to see these things to the end regardless of the frustration. At the very least, you have a reader who will never touch one of your books again. So, you have to be very careful with the flow of action.
This isn’t to say that books don’t have commercial breaks of some type. One could look at chapters and chapter breaks as spots to give the audience a rest. Unlike some types of sports, you have to give some temporary closure and not make this so sudden. The audience needs to be able to walk away for a bit and come back, which again means you need it to work with the flow. Still, these are the spots that you can use to create this pauses in the action. Even looking at them as mini-cliffhangers, similar to end of a quarter or half, that will be swiftly fixed.
Maybe this is a shaky and simplistic analogy, but I think it works. An author who enjoys sports can look at this explanation and get a good idea on how not to do a flow. They can look at their own feelings when a sport is abruptly paused and they are left hanging until the action starts again. Then, make sure such a sensation isn’t created by your own writing. Whatever helps you improve your style, right?
So, what do other people think of this analogy and comparison?
Follow-up! Greetings! Liz Gauffreau with you today. For today’s post, I’m doing a brief follow-up to my previous post on using character occupations …
Character Occupations Follow-up
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. Still don’t quite get how crucifixion of Jesus involves bunnies, colored eggs, chocolate, and ham. Then again, Jews eat willingly eat gefilte fish, so I guess religion and culture doesn’t need a reason. Enjoy the holiday.
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Well, I’m still in upstate New York after arriving Thursday afternoon. I’ve only edited one chapter of Darwin & the Beast Collector, but I plan on getting another done today. I wanted to start editing on Thursday, but the trip up had a lot of construction and it was simply grueling. Instead, I stretched my legs with a walk through a park, stopped by the exotic snack place, and grabbed dinner. The rest was kind of a blur of exhaustion and sorting through some mental stuff.
I don’t know if I’m going to get together with friends because the few I talk to had work, kids, and Easter to handle. Figured it was a chance to get some time alone to think, edit, and catch Pokemon when the weather held. Editing and catching were slow going, but my brain is definitely bouncing around like a deranged maniac. I think coming up here causes my mental walls to weaken, so old memories and emotions leak out. Without work or my son to keep my occupied, I start examining my life and where I am now, which doesn’t go smoothly. So much has happened to me and I’ve done so much since I left Oswego, which might be the last place I was living for myself.
Uh, backtracking a bit, I should say that I started the break with my son and celebrating Passover. He wasn’t happy about only having matzah to eat, but we eventually cheated by going to Burger King with my friend. The story behind that is that this is the same friend in high school who convinced me to go to BK to cheat and that nobody would know. We came walking out with our burgers only to find my dad walking out of the bank right across the mall walkway. So, a BK cheat has become a funny tradition if I decide I can’t take matzah any more.
Really isn’t anything majorly exciting that happened since the plan for spring break was solely to relax. Monday is back to work and the final stretch for the end of the school year, which means a lot of work. I’m going to try really hard to fit more editing time into my weekends and maybe a few evenings. I’ll have 6 more chapters to go once I get home from Oswego. Might shoot for more since I don’t have much else to do today and not finding the Pokemon group means I can’t do the event. Can’t tell if I’m wasting my time here or if I’m being productive.
There was an interesting point during the drive where I started noticing a plot issue with the character of Rayne. Nothing that involves the adventure she has with Darwin, but something with her future adventures. I should probably start setting things up in this book even though the truth would be revealed in another series. I don’t really know if that makes sense or how I’m going to make it work. Don’t know if I’ll ever get to writing at the rate I used to either, so this could all be moot. Still, I guess I should have notes down in case somebody can do something with it. It’s fun coming up with this stuff, but it always draws me back to the ‘stalled author’ mentality that lingers in my mind.
Goals of the week:
Legends of Windemere 