Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

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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We’re trying to revamp the Popcorn Dialogues site, and it’s making us look at websites in general and PopD in particular in a new light. The current topic is “categories” as we try to figure out the best way to organize the site. We’ll be tagging the posts, so this isn’t about searching for a topic, it’s about how the overall organization of the posts work. The problem is that Lani and I define the site in different ways. read more >>

Yes, I know this is another Good Blog post which doesn’t count as actual blogging, but life here is kicking my butt (nothing serious, just lots of STUFF) and I was searching for a picture of a basket for the FTL collage and tripped over this blog. I love buildings. Not architecture, buildings, places people live in and work in and pass by every day. (Architecture is to buildings as literature is to story . . . .) Most of all I love weird but happy buildings. So I was caught when I tripped over the “Most Unique Buildings” post on the Crazy Junkyard blog. (Note to blogger: there is no “most unique;” “unique” is always “most” since it means “one of kind.” These are the things that drive English teachers nuts). My fave is the Crooked House (“the most photographed house in Poland”):
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