Being a Better Writer: Scale, Scope, and Ideas · 6:27pm Nov 6th, 2018
Welcome back readers. How was your weekend? Was it good?
Mine was. A Game of Stakes is going into Beta Reading this week thanks to my Saturday, so it’s one step closer to being done! I’m going to try and polish the Alpha off today, which was going to be yesterday, but … Well, I had a work shift. And for the moment, Being a Better Writer takes precedence. Sorry for the delay, however.
Also, one other bit of cool news. I’m not sure about the internet etiquette for this scenario, so hopefully I don’t mess it up, but I’ve started getting hits from Wikipedia? Why? Being a Better Writer is being used as a source reference!
Again, not sure of the etiquette here. I only just noticed because I started seeing referral links from Wikipedia but … hey, cool! One further notch in “look how far I’ve come!”
Sands, maybe someday I’ll have a Wikipedia page dedicated to it or something. I’d not thought about that angle until this moment. Kind of an awesome thought.
I’d best get to work on building a future where that can happen, then! So, with news out of the way, let’s talk about ideas and scale.
This one is … an interesting topic. One that was brought about, as many of my topics are, by reading. In this case, it was reading two Science Fiction books, unrelated outside of genre, back-to-back and looking deeply at why I enjoyed one so much more than the other. After thinking about it for a time and letting my mind run across a large number of different traits and possible reasons, it was reading a thirdbook that finally made things click in my head. And when it clicked, it clicked.
It has to do with scale and scope, plus ideas, and how those are brought about in your story.
I've noticed in war documentaries, they always have letters from soldiers or eyewitness testimony because that really brings the horror of war to human sized dimensions. After hearing about all of the stats and seeing the pictures having someone write home, and describe what they see gives people a small glimpse of what it's like on the battlefield.
Is this what you mean about being grounded?
Good post.
Do you have a blog on how to pick topics that can fit in a short one chapter story?
I wrote a story that ended up being a chapter one instead of a self contained story.