You don’t need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you’ve written, you should be able to point to any given element – be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point – and say why it’s there.
If I’m goin’ to lie on my face wi’ my buttocks bared, I want the lass under me, not behind me wi’ a hatpin!
Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage.
Then ye live with it, laddie,” he said softly. “That’s all.
Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.
If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.
Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what’s happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you’ll see the change of focus – zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above – easily. You want to do that in what you write; it’s one of the things that keep people’s eyes on the page, though they’re almost never conscious of it.
Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped.
Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible.
If Scotsmen were stubborn about anything – and, in fact, they tended to be stubborn about quite a number of things, truth be known – it was the virtues of oatmeal parritch for breakfast. Through eons of living in a land so poor there was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.
Jamie’s viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. He’s using physical language, but he isn’t talking about the physical details of the situation. Claire alludes to her emotion and shows it by her actions, but Jamie is thinking directly in pure emotions.
Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good.
I? Well,” he said slowly, “I sit, and I look at Him.” A wide smile stretched the fine-drawn lips. “And He looks at me.
Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
The door was now ajar, the light of an unknown future shining through its crack. But it would take more strength than I had alone to push it open. I watched the rise and fall of his breath, and the play of light and shadow on the strong, clean lines of his face, and knew that nothing truly mattered between us but the fact that we both still lived.
But he found the wall of prayer a barricade between himself and the wicked sly thoughts and, closing his eyes briefly, felt his father walk beside him and Brian Fraser’s last kiss soft as the wind on his cheek. –.
There is something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An eminently useful life.’ She smiled at me. ‘I could think of many worse epitaphs than that, milady.
Do you know where Laoghaire is?
Ah,” said MacLeod, satisfaction spreading itself across his weathered features. “It is so, then, that you know all the songs of the Highlands and the Isles?” “Not all,” said Roger, smiling. “But many – and I will learn more.” “Do that,” said MacLeod, nodding slowly. “Do that, Singer – and teach them to your sons.” His eye lighted on Brianna, and a faint smile curled on his lips. “Let them sing to my sons, that they will know the place they came from – though they will never see it.” One.
It is not the place of science to insist on explanation – but only to observe, in hopes that the explanation will manifest itself.
The story detailed all of his works, and then concluded in these words – ‘And so he died, at the conclusion of an eminently useful life, and thus obtained his crown in Paradise.’ ” She paused, flexing her hands lightly on her knees. “There was something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An eminently useful life.’ ” She smiled at me. “I could think of many worse epitaphs than that, milady.