Writing Roots

Mystery is a friend to all writers, no matter the genre. Sometimes, what you leave out tells your reader a lot more about characters or the world than what you explain. In this episode, we talk about what you can leave out, tricks to knowing when to wait, and what makes backstory interesting.

Intentional or not, you are always making promises to your reader. Whether it's promises related to the genre or how you establish your first chapter, you're setting the reader's expectations. When you break those promises, it can guarantee bad reviews - or at the very least, no word-of-mouth promotion. In this episode, we discuss the kinds of promises you make and how to be intentional about it.

The topic of this episode ventures slightly into written communication, though not within the bounds of the text itself. There are lots of useful tools with formatting that can help your readers navigate your book and understand the full context, especially with non-fiction books. In this episode, we talk about the table of contents, headers and footers.

The final formatting of a novel is a key part of connecting with your readers. From font size to chapter headers, it influences the reader's experience. In this episode, we talk about when font matters and basics of formatting chapters and scenes.

One of the questions we see often popping up in writing circles is "what is head hopping?" It's often confused with simply having multiple points of view, but they are two very different things. In this episode, we look at how to identify POV in order to avoid head hopping, and different formatting tools you can use to show your readers whose thoughts they're seeing on the page.

Another way to create a rhythm in storytelling is through the sentences themselves. From the length of each sentence to the choice of punctuation, you can direct how the reader interacts with each scene. In this episode, we discuss how to use these two tools to establish the pace you want.

Establishing a rhythm - not the kind used in poetry - in scenes can convey a message of its own to your reader. Within dialogue, it can help with pacing, direct focus to important pieces of information, and tell the reader a lot about the character speaking. When you understand how to use the three main ways to tag out dialogue, you can skillfully direct the reader through scenes and quickly or slowly as you need.

The use of white space in your book is a subtle, yet powerful way you can communicate with your readers. Lots of white space with extremely short paragraphs pushes the reader through the pages faster. Long, dense paragraphs and pages with little white space will slow the reader down. Understanding how to use this white space and paragraphing to your advantage will help you communicate better with your reader. In this episode, we talk about what white space is and how to use it to your advantage.

There are a lot of ways to communicate to your readers, including ways that go beyond the words themselves. The reader's experience also involves elements such as pacing, epigraphs, and even how the words look on the page. Before we can talk about everything that goes into unwritten communication, we need to talk about how the readers consume their books, and how understanding this can make a difference in how you approach publishing.

The reason we have spent the month looking at the structures of storytelling, characters and more is for one reason: to improve your own instincts for writing. When you become familiar with concepts like pacing, it is easier to include it in your own stories without trying. This is especially important for pantsers.

For this bonus episode, we wanted to dive more into how plot structures are still important for pantsers to understand and how you can use them even after you've written the story.