Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

Rox sent our critique group, the Glindas, to la boite verte to see pictures like this:

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As I posted yesterday, we’re doing some new things on Cherry Forums this year. Today it’s about readers. We’re keeping the Cherry Forums Book Club and the Gothic Book Club (which will next fall become the Romantic Comedy Book Club or some other genre), and we’re adding Eleven Questions (thank you very much) and the Trope of the Month, a discussion of an often-used trope in fiction: secret baby, amnesia, best-friends-fall-in-love, the makeover, etc. So here’s a question: What kind of tropes would you like to talk about? We’re looking for future tropes, Argh People. Thank you very much. read more >>

Okay, I know I’ve been asking you questions relentlessly, but I have more that need answered before the new year. Over on Cherry Forums, we’re changing things up (because I get bored) and adding some new topics in both the Reading and the Writing Forums. I’ll get to Reading tomorrow, but today I need help on the Writing Forums. We’re doing four new topics there: The Writer’s Book Club (just like any other book club except all writing craft books), Exercise from Hell , the Difficult Scene (published authors talk about a scene that was tough to write and how they solved it), and Explain That Again.

Explain That Again is a discussion of some small aspect of writing (headhopping in particular not POV in general) that is often misunderstood, confusing, or ignored. The first one is probably going to be Headhopping, and other suggested topics have been The Exposition Fairy, Prologues and Epilogues, Anvilicious Writing, etc. We need you to fill in the “etc.” part. What rule/guideline/common wisdom in writing has always confused you, what precept have you never quite really understood? What specific aspect of writing would you like clarity on?

And thank you very much for your help.

Edited to add:
And so far the suggestions are:

Antagonists
Anvilicious Writing
Beats
Bookending
Chapters
Conflict
Dialogue
Foreshadowing
Headhopping
Infodump/The Exposition Fairy/Author Intrusion
Omniscient POV
Openings (First Lines)
Motifs
Pacing
Prologues and Epilogues
Show Don’t Tell
Symbols and Metaphors
Time Shifts
Tone
Tricksters
Turning Points

That’s eighteen and we only needed twelve, so good job!

Tis the season to be with family and be treated like a child again, which at my house means “Are you going to wear your hair like that?” In honor of that time machine, go look at Young Me Now Me, a great blog where people send in old pictures of themselves that they’ve recreated today. It’s funny and sad and heartwarming all at the same time. I love this blog. I mean, tell me looking at this picture doesn’t make you all verklempt:

(And thank you, Ryan Tate of Valleywag, for directing me there.)

So where do we want to go on Popcorn Dialogues after the historical survey? We have some ideas below, but we want to hear yours, too. Here are some of the things we’ve talked about, with possible titles underneath each heading. The criteria is “What can we learn about story from this, Dorothy?” but we’ll watch pretty much anything. Oh, and we want each series to be between four to eight movies.

Romantic Adventure:
What can we learn from this:
How to write action, adventure, violence, suspense.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Romancing the Stone
The Mummy

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