Wednesday, August 15, 2007

A writing tip for free...

I was planning to transcribe all my notes from the conference, but if I do that it will take time that I don’t have right now, so I thought I’d add the occasional titbit of advice that I gleaned – those writing tips that made the penny drop for me.

One from Jenny Crusie was this:-

Consider starting your scenes a beat later and finishing them a beat earlier.

Now, I thought I already knew about jump cutting from one scene to the next without too much musing or introspection or dillydallying, but this morning I was reading through the beginning of the book I started yesterday and thought nah, don't like this. Then I realised that Jenny’s advice would improve it enormously.

I’d started a beat too soon.

I’m not going to expand on this now.

But believe me, it’s good advice.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I shall be looking for your early and late beats in further books!!! Some of the books, films and TV shows I especially like are the ones that leave me floundering a little at the start: the ones where I have to work a bit to be able to enter the story. I think she's right!!!