A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like “He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.” They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing--just held up the action. I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description. The thing they remembered, that haunted them, was not for example, that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear the death knock on the door. That damned little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.
-- Raymond Chandler
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Yuffie's Writing How-To's
RandomA story isn't just a bunch of words slapped onto a page. It's a living, breathing manifestation of your imagination. This guide explores aspects most guides don't touch on such as memorable protagonists, world building, character psychology, and bac...
