Writing Roots

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.

Our final storytelling case study of the month is Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton. Signature to his style, this movie relies a lot on visual elements to convey the stark difference between the two stories being told within the film. Even then, there is still a lot to learn from various choices, from character names to the overall structure.

Stranger than Fiction is an interesting study for authors, and not just because of the meta nature of it. There is a lot to learn by studying this movie, from writing distinctive character voices to planning a woven plot where decisions influence the lives of everyone else in the story.

For this episode of our Case Studies series, we turn to a modern murder mystery that harkens back to the classics such as Agatha Christie. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery uses visual misdirection and the power of suggestion to weave an intricate closed-door mystery. Though you don't have the same visual outlet when writing a book, there is still a lot to learn from the structure, characters, and clever use of dialogue.

If you're interested in writing a memoir, stories and movies based on true events are a great place to start. When deciding to write about your own experiences, finding where to start is one of your biggest challenges. Welcome to Marwen, our case study in this episode, made intentional choices that may not have been the obvious ones for what part of Mark's life they were going to highlight. Listen along with us as we break down the characters and storytelling choices that makes this movie a resource for learning how to write.

Jaws has maintained a place in popular culture, despite being nearly 50 years old. It has memorable and distinct characters, and a monster interesting enough to haunt the nightmares of many for decades. In this episode, we break down the movie and what we can take from it to improve our own storytelling.

Studio Ghibli is known for heartwarming and magical stories. They are a great source of inspiration for many writers, and often the perfect stories to study to learn about immersive storytelling. In this episode, our hosts review Kiki's Delivery Service and break down the aspects of characters, plot and the worldbuilding weaved throughout the movie.