First of all, thank you so much to Wendy and Sandi for letting us critique your work! We have six more samples to cover next week and plan to get to all of them. If you would prefer to have your name not mentioned when we critique, please let me know. We don’t want to make this any hard than it has to be!

If you missed Session 6 and want to watch now, click here.

Questions and Comments

As usual, we have a few questions from the webinar that we’d like to address here.

Question: So is feeling when a stimulus triggers one of the five senses? (by Jana King—thank you)
A feeling is any reaction caused by a stimulus. So it can be a five-senses, physical feeling like pain (upon touching a needle) or an emotional feeling like excitement (upon touching the same needle—like maybe the needle is the portal to a new, awesome world). Upon touching the needles, if you have the character grumble (reacting to the pain), while the reader was primarily focused on the excitement, your reader could get the mistaken impression that the character doesn’t like the new, awesome world. Later, when the character loves the world, the reader is confused, and even worse, the reader may not remember where the confusion started. As the writer, go back up to the moment of the pin-prick and give us a clue about which feeling is fore-front in the character’s mind BEFORE you show her grumble or whatever. Many, many times the feeling is obvious. However, confusion can be problematic in first chapters and walking your reader through a feeling is better than letting them struggle to understand.

Question: Um, were there more questions? I cut and copied the chat window, which disappears after the webinar ends, but I missed a few chats from the top. Send us your questions if you’ve got them.

One More Thought: I wanted to clarify that at a micro-level a decision and an action are usually the same. BUT NOT AT A MACRO LEVEL. Let’s take a minute to explain why.

When you have a grand, chapter-ending plot-point, like the discovery of a vicious crime, that is a micro-level motivation and the ending to a macro-level SCENE. The next step of the writing is to show the reaction. You can’t simply give the micro-reaction in one line, or even all four reactions—one line each—and done. No. It’s such a pivotal event (as each ending to a SCENE ought to be) that it should get several paragraphs or pages as characters process and talk about the new info. Those pages are become a macro-level SEQUEL. SEQUELS will have within them their own micro-level motivations and reactions, and will end with a decision (not an action.) At the macro-level, decisions won’t work out easily. “Oh, let’s find the criminal.” So I did. The end. No! A novel is a long story where the characters fight hard—where their decisions and first tries at action are thwarted by a complex, strong world they must grapple with for 300 pages. THUS DECISIONS AND ACTION AT A MACRO LEVEL ARE QUITE SEPARATE. Many authors call this a try-fail cycle.

Okay, see you next week at Session 7!