Tuesday's Writer's Tip A Bit More on Using Details #MFRWAuthor #BWL Publishing LTD #writing #Details

Don't use the information garnered too soon or too late. Too soon might do a number of things like give the plot away or make the character's actions seem foolish. Being too late may already have lost the reader if the information they need to understand what's going on comes after all the action is completed.

If you're writing about a career you know nothing about take the time to find someone involved in that career and talk to them. There are also other ways to find this material if you can't find a person nearby or have not found one who will answer your questions. Search the internet. When writing about a chef, I spent a lot of time watching the Food Channel and listening to what the chefs said.
As well as talking to food people I knew.

Remember the time period and keep the characters in sync with that time. I've done some books with ancient Egypt as the background and spent a lot of time looking at things such as food. There were no things like tomatoes and corn to name a few. Putting something that doesn't belong will turn your reader off and they will wonder how much you pay to attention.

Tuesday's Writer's Tip - Overdoing Details - Research #MFRWAuthor #BWLAuthor #Research

In the book you're writing, you've ahd to research a subject. You have pages about this subject and want to weave it into your story. So you begin and go on and on. Suddenly your fictional story becomes a class about the subject you've researched. I know so well how this can happen. In one of my books, I was researching India. Now there wasn't that much about India in the book since the heroine and her sisters leave India and travel to England. When the first draft finished, I astounded myself with the amount of detail I had about the India of the 1800s. The entire first chapter read more like a travelogue of the time and the land.

Then came the revision and the cutting. Which of the facts would advance the story. After much hair-pulling, I finally trimmed about eight thousand words from the book.

Research is necessary for the writer to learn about places, careers and other things but must be used judiciously in the story. Put some of the things in dialogue rather than long passages of prose. You might sneak in some of the information in the character's thoughts. Just don't give a lecture about what you're writing about.