Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

Craft Of Writing

In Late, Out Early

by Leave a Comment

The “in late, out early” rule is a cornerstone of pacing and narrative tension. If you’re not familiar with this phrase, fear not! It’s simpler than it sounds, and when wielded effectively, can cut bloat and dramatically sharpen your story.

Let’s break down what this rule means, how it works, and why it’s a game-changer for fiction writers.

“In Late, Out Early”

The “In Late, Out Early” rule refers to the technique of starting a scene at the last possible moment where the action is already in motion, then leaving the scene riiight before the action winds down. It avoids unnecessary set-up, summarizing, and transitions (at the entry point) and drawn-out conclusions or unnecessary resolution (at the exit).

Think of it as focusing your energy and attention on the heart of a scene, where stakes are high, and things are about to change for your characters. Then, once the crucial moment passes, you step out, leaving the reader hungry for what happens next. The faster you can pull your reader through the story without losing depth and meaning, the more likely they are to stay with you until the end.

(And the more bloat you cut, the more words you free up for those deep and meaningful scenes!)

But most importantly, “In Late, Out Early” is an editing technique. Though we get better at identifying where our scenes really should start and end with time and practice, even the best writers fail to find the sweet spot while drafting. In our first (second, even third!) time through, we’re still telling ourselves the story. We tend to write our way into scenes, putting more background detail and set-up into the openers than we’ll keep in our final draft because we need that detail and set-up to keep ourselves oriented and moving in the right direction as we’re typing. We’ll often end late, too, passing the end of the action and giving our characters time to dawdle, waffle, or—importantly—think. While this hemming and hawing might not make it through to the final draft, it can be a big part of our creative process as we get to know our characters, their goals, and the way they respond and react to what’s happening around them.

In other words, if you’re currently panicking because you tend to get in early and out late, no worries. You needed those words when you wrote them. None of them are wasted! And now, during the self-editing process (and with the clarity and hindsight a little time and space provides), it’s time to find those spots and trim for clarity.

Or to put it in a catchier way: pacing is perfected in edits.

The rest of this post is available at the AuthorShip+ tiers on Cee’s Patreon. Click the image above to go straight to the post, or take a look at the tiers and what they have to offer right here.

Why Your Opener Isn’t Working

by Leave a Comment

One of the chief mistakes I see in the opening paragraphs of my clients’ work (and let’s be fair, my work, too!) is a missing story element. While there’s no true recipe for writing a banger of a story opener, when it comes to genre fiction, the large majority of great openers* rest on three solid pillars:

  • They ground the reader in place and time by establishing setting
  • They connect the reader to a character
  • They establish a purpose for that character

You might think, damn, that’s a whole lot to do in a paragraph or two, and you’re not wrong! But part of what separates a good writer from a great one is the ability to pick, with laser-like precision, the exact right opener that lets them get all three on the page immediately.

Most effective openers are either written in-scene, or, if they start out of scene (up in the protagonist’s head, in memory, in recollection, etc.) they quickly zoom into real-time writing. When we talk about in medias res writing, that’s really what we mean—starting in-scene. It’s hard for the reader to find their footing when the character’s head is in the clouds!

Likewise, it’s also hard for them to find their footing when the story opens so directly in the middle of the action that time, place, and purpose become unclear. Chase scenes, for example, can be difficult for this reason. If the character is running for their life, it can be challenging to give the reader a good look at where they are, who they are, and why they’re being chased. The hook isn’t in bombastic explosions; it’s in the immediacy of the reader’s connection to character and world.

Let’s take a look at how to develop this connection by using examples. This might be a fun one for anyone who has read my backlist, because I’m starting with the opening lines of Wicked Waters. I wrote this version of the opener around 2016 and haven’t touched it since then.

Foul air clung to the town like a pestilent blanket. The breeze had died days earlier, leaving the inland provinces to suffer in sweltering, stagnant heat. A thick silence reigned. Even the animals had fled. Nothing moved but for a few wisps of smoke rising from smoldering ruins.

What’s off about this? Nothing tremendous, but it’s missing both character and purpose. In other words, the opener is imbalanced, and through that imbalance, misses an opportunity to connect to the reader.

To fully rewrite this, I’d need two paragraphs—but feel free to judge the strength of the rewrite on the first paragraph alone.

Foul air clung to the town like a pestilent blanket. The breeze had died days earlier, leaving the inland provinces and all the unfortunate souls within them to suffer in sweltering, stagnant heat. Valory bar Adrianth counted himself among those unfortunate souls, but duty was duty, and if he didn’t haul his men to the arse end of nowhere in the name of keeping the border secure, who would?

Not that there was much left of Lannoch to secure. The town lay silent and still when they arrived, for even the animals had fled. All that remained were wisps of smoke rising from still-smoldering ruins—a lonely blight upon the province’s arid grasslands.

This version of the opener starts with the same distant overview of setting, but quickly zooms in to mention people in the general sense, then name the POV character directly. Not only does this introduction establish character, but it connects character to setting by showing the reader what he thinks about it.

We also learn quite a bit about Val throughout these lines: that he’s duty-bound to keep the border secure, that he’s a leader in charge of others, and that he takes a somewhat sanguine tone when confronted with tragedy. In other words, we don’t just get character, but we get purpose and voice, too.

The next major change happens in the following paragraph when the town itself gets connected to a broader setting. In the original, the town isn’t positioned within the story’s broader world—it isn’t even named! In the new version, the reader gets a clear picture of a lone town in the middle of arid grasslands.

It’s still not perfect (I rewrote it about ten minutes ago, to be fair), but it’s much stronger hook, no?

So, what actionable advice can we take about world, character, and purpose? For my part, I’d say that writing a good opening scene is about giving the reader:

  • A vivid visual of the setting
  • A keen and quick sense of who the character is
  • A hint at how character and setting are connected to one another, ie: why is this character here and/or what is this character trying to do here?

*Caveat: there are plenty of ways to write an opener, and I’m sure you can come up with examples of books you’ve loved that haven’t hit all three of these bullet points. That’s fine! Art is gooey and subjective, and there’s no true formula for hooking readers in. But in the full version of this post (which you can find at the AuthorShip+ tiers on my Patreon), I’ve fleshed out my theory with more examples from some of this generation’s best Fantasy writers: Jemisin, Chakraborty, Lee.

With all that said, here are some questions for you:

What do the opening scenes you love have in common? What elements of setting do your favorite writers tend to focus on in order to get the most powerful, impactful image onto the page? How do they use the vividity of those settings to hint at character purpose?

And how do they connect the reader to character? Through description? Through narrowing psychic distance and using deep interiority?

The only practice better than picking apart the works we love is taking the time to work and rework our own writing. Pick an old opener of yours, pull it apart, and try to figure out why it didn’t land right. What’s it missing? How might you tweak it to create a sharper hook?

I hope you find the exercise as helpful as I just did!

Editing for Atmosphere

by Leave a Comment

I am, like most writers, a weird pretzel of an overwriter and an underwriter depending on the circumstance. When I’m trying to hammer a scene into shape, my prose tends towards the simplistic, or the ‘windowpane,’ though I often include too much of my thought process (or my character’s though process, or worldbuilding, or dialogue, or…).

One place I tend to cut close to the bone is in physical description — especially early in a story, especially when I’m drafting. Glossing through descriptions and throwing in ‘basic’ placeholders allows me to get into the meat of scenes more quickly, which is particularly important in the early days when I’m trying to get into gear on a project. I get into trouble, though, when those ‘basic’ descriptions become so ingrained in my memory that I stop seeing them for what they are: 2D renderings of something that ought to eventually be painted in 3D color.

I’d consider my descriptive writing to be among my weakest points, and in general, I don’t find my prose to be particularly evocative or beautiful. This is something I’m working on, but hooboy does it take time! To that end, though, I’d like to show you some of the progress I’ve been making in my writing and how I’ve started training myself to make it.

While combing back through the first few chapters of my new WIP Salt, Steel, Silk, I identified important moments of description (of character or setting) by highlighting them. Then, once all of my description was picked out to be easily found, I put my own writing away and started grabbing books from my shelf.

I read through some of my favorite descriptive passages from authors I admire to get the flow of prose I’d like to emulate in my head. For this particular exercise, I decided I wanted to get some very specific writing advice in my head, so I searched for videos that read comparisons between weaker / barer bones prose and stronger or more evocative prose. I happened upon a fantastic TikTok comparing the writing of Sarah J. Maas and Rachel Gillig. This was a particularly helpful video for me, because while my writing in general doesn’t read like Maas (I don’t write characters like her, I don’t write interiority like her, and in particular my action and dialogue scenes are markedly different), my descriptive prose absolutely reads like Maas, which is something I’d ideally like to avoid.

(As the above creator says: nuance alert! If you love Maas, that’s fine. I don’t, but even her fans would likely agree that, while her sentence-level craft makes her work digestible, it isn’t one of her greater narrative strengths. As a result, it isn’t an element of her storytelling that I would like to emulate.)

My favorite thing about comparative resources like the video above is how it highlights what kind of tiny, nuanced details a writer like Gillig pulls out of the story in order to create an immersive sense of place. After watching the video several times through, I felt like I was ready to tackle the largest / chonkiest descriptive passage in my WIP thus far.

While I was making my edits, I tried to keep the following things in mind:

  • How does the protag feel about the location?
  • What’s about to happen in this location?
  • What kind of history does he have in this location?
  • What time of day is it, and how does the time of day / temperature / other changeable elements of the environment impact his experience of the location?
  • What unique sounds, sights, and smells might he encounter as he enters?
  • What’s so interesting or unique about this location, and how can I pull upon those sensory details in order to better ground the reader?

Though I often have a vague list of running questions of ^that general variety in my head when I’m writing the rough draft of a description, my rougher drafts almost always feel like shorthand; I state general facts instead of evoking specific imagery, and my attempts to pin down specific imagery tend to get a little stilted or wobbly.

Additionally, I kept a few other prose-level concerns in mind:

  • Am I adding distance between the reader and the protag by inserting filtering phrases?
  • Am I blending interiority and description, or does my switching tend to happen in blocks?
  • Am I varying the feel, length, and style of my sentences in order to promote better narrative flow?
  • Am I using specific words and generating specific images, or is my phrasing more general? Similarly, am I zooming in and zooming out of important details as needed, or is my zoom lens getting stuck?
  • Naturally, I know what the protag is thinking and what he’s trying to say, but how well is that line of logic getting communicated to the reader?

To put it mildly, this is a heck-ton of stuff to keep in mind while combing through a single page of writing. But if I let myself gloss through these moments without giving them enough thought, I suspect my craft will never level up to where I’d like it to be.

I hope that taking a look at my thought process might help those of you who are struggling with descriptive writing in your own work, not by holding my process as an exemplar, but because it might help you figure out what questions to ask yourself about your own writing.

If you’re interested in getting a look at the original and edited excerpts I’ve described above, you can find them in the full version of this post on my Patreon. I gate longform content like this at the AuthorShip+ tiers, so if you’re interested in craft of writing content (and videos, and the opportunity to AMA in the discord server), consider becoming part of the crew!

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, happy writing!

Do Your Characters Have Stage Fright?

by Leave a Comment

Note: this is a preview of a post that’s fully available on Cee’s Patreon.

Do your characters ever suffer from a case of “stage fright?” Y’know, that initial awkwardness which bleeds its way into their words and actions as you try to figure out what they’d do/say? The shy hesitation, as if they’re waiting for their cue to fully step into the spotlight of your novel?

You’re not alone. As authors, we often find ourselves playing the role of directors, coaxing our characters out of their shells and guiding them toward a captivating performance.

Crafting a character’s personality bears some similarity to coaching a fledgling actor. It takes time, dedication, and the creative energy to work out exactly what’s going on in their head whenever they’re on the stage. And that says nothing of the patience it takes as we slog through those first few chapters with stiff, difficult characters who haven’t yet blossomed into the rich, multidimensional personalities we had in mind.

Characters get stage fright not because they’re actual actors feeling nervous about tackling our novel’s first few scenes, but because we’re nervous as we write—with how little we really know about them now that they’ve left the nebulous wisp of our daydreams and been locked into words on a page. In other words: we might think we know them when we picture the handful of scenes we’re excited to write. But a novel is more than a handful of scenes, and eventually, we’ll hit scenarios for which our daydreams didn’t prepare us—scenarios in which our characters no longer confidently lead us across the stage.

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “what the heck would they do or say in this situation?” this post is for you. I’ve put together five thought experiments / writing exercises to guide and enrich the character development process. Grab your metaphorical director’s chair, and let’s dive in!

#1 Tick, tick, boom

The ‘ticking clock’ is a metaphor used by Lisa Cron in Story Genius to refer to the countdown of events that happens before the clock ‘strikes midnight’ at the story’s inciting incident. She uses this metaphor as a way to help writers figure out where their opening scene should sit.

Although one of the first things we figure out about our story is where it starts, we don’t often think about what’s happened immediately before the beginning of our story—the days, weeks, and months leading up to the opener—in more than vague terms.

When we say stories start in medias res, we mean that our stories begin on a day in the middle of the protagonist’s life. One of the best ways to get to know them is to do a ‘tick, tick, boom’ writing exercise for the four or five ticks prior to the first scene. Use the immediate run-up to the opening scene as a tool to understand how the character’s decisions and behaviors set them on track to end up center-stage at the beginning of act one.

Consider: The Fellowship of the Ring opens on Bilbo’s 111th birthday party, and the events that follow predispose Frodo to saying ‘yes’ to bringing the ring to Rivendell. But what happened in the days leading up to this birthday party? The weeks leading up to it? The months leading up to it? If I were Tolkien, I could get a better handle on Frodo’s character by picking a timescale that best suited him and his story, then writing a scene for each ‘tick’ leading up to page one.

Write the four or five scenes that precede the opener of your story, paying particular attention to your protagonist’s voice and GMC (goals, motivations, conflicts). These scenes can take place once a day prior to the story start, or once a week/month/year—the choice of timescale is yours.

Walking backwards can help you get a better handle on your characters by forcing you to think about who they are and what they want outside the driving motion of the external plot.

The rest of this post is available at the AuthorShip+ tiers on Cee’s Patreon. Click the image above to go straight to the post, or take a look at the tiers and what they have to offer right here.

Are You Telling a Story or Writing Alt Text?

by Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, I posted a TikTok posing this question to writers:

Are you telling a story, or are you writing up the alt text of the movie that’s playing in your head?

Some writers tend to focus almost entirely on the external when writing, often leaving context via narrative interiority by the wayside. When this coincides with an overabundance of external action, sometimes called “stage direction,” it can feel like we’re reading descriptive alt text instead of an actual story. At a minimum, the reader’s connection to character will suffer. At worst, the reader will get bored and close the book.

I’ve since followed up with videos (and a blog post!) about braiding interiority into prose and varying narrative style, but have also received questions about what scenes look and feel like when they’re just alt-text-like.

To that end, I’ve typed up and taken screenshots of a relatively* random page from Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, the first book in a YA Fantasy trilogy.

*It wasn’t entirely random because Novik’s character is quite chatty and tends to editorialize, so I chose a page where external action created more of a braided style.

The first screenshot is the story as Novik wrote it. The second screenshot has everything except the ‘alt-text’ blacked out.

Any typos are mine.

Now let’s check out the alt-text version:

Yikes, that’s a lot of context gone, right?

And that’s precisely the issue with alt-text narration. Because it focuses primarily on stage direction and (sometimes) physical interiority (ie: stomachs clenching and hearts beating), it tends to leave us with a relatively shallow understanding of what’s going on in a given scene. Since this page is from the first few chapters of A Deadly Education, that missing context would be a huge missed opportunity for Novik, who managed to work worldbuilding, character development, and backstory in between lines of action in order to enrich the reader’s understanding of the story.

Hope this helps provide a stronger visual for anyone wondering what I mean when I talk about “alt-text,” stage direction, or interiority — and feel free to hit me up in the comments with any questions.

-Cee

PS: Did you know I write a monthly blog post (and record a monthly video) just for Patrons at the AuthorShip+ tiers? I also give priority to answering patron questions about craft here, on discord, or via TikTok/PatreonVideo (if questions are best answered verbally). Check out my tiers to see if membership is right for you 🙂

Braiding Prose

by Leave a Comment

If developmental or structural editing focuses on what your story is about, line editing focuses on how your story is told. The what and the how are inseparable elements; line level skills like effective dialogue, rhythmic writing, psychic distance and manipulation of POV, quick transitions, snappy action, etc. can have impacts far beyond the line level.

Effective (or ineffective!) prose will have a dramatic impact on characterization, the development of story arcs, pacing, foreshadowing, reader attachment, worldbuilding, and the connectivity between scenes—to name a few!

What makes prose effective? Hooboy, I could write posts and posts on prose and merely scratch the surface. But if I were to name one of the biggest make-or-break skills I see new writers struggling with, it’d be narrative balance.

As an editor, one of the easiest ways to tell whether a writer is a beginner, intermediate, or advanced is through how well they vary and balance different narrative techniques in their prose. In modern fiction, there are four skills or ‘styles’ to conquer on the quest to write more compelling and immersive narratives: action, description, dialogue, and interiority.

In this post, we’ll do a deep dive into these four different styles, get a tip for a writing exercise geared towards improving narrative variation, and, at the end, we’ll do a case study that applies this writing exercise to four different SFF novels: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows, Frostbitten by Dietrich Stogner, and Bioluminescence by Toni Duarte.

In fiction, there are four major narrative building blocks:

  1. Action (sometimes called stage direction, ie: she picked up the cup)
  2. Description (ie: it was a beautiful summer’s day)
  3. Dialogue (self-explanatory, I hope)
  4. Interiority (verbatim or summarized thought)

Strong writers have a facility with blending all four of these elements to create a balanced, compelling story. Well-braided prose reads easily and provides both enough external motion to be interesting and enough interiority to deliver context and give the story meaning.

“But Cee, there are dialogue-only stories that work beautifully!”

There sure are! But you can rest assured that writers with the chops to create a phenomenal, dialogue-only story first learned how to balance and braid prose, then took on the challenge of warping that braid. Or, to use a favorite metaphor of mine: even Jackson Pollock took figure drawing. Writers of experimental prose still have the ability to braid their narrative elements, but they’re choosing not to for stylistic reasons.

I’ve used the term ‘braid’ a few times, now, which is how I think of prose: a bit like a braided cord, or a tapestry, or perhaps a spider web. Eliminate a strand (or use too little of it, or pick it apart) and you won’t have a functioning braid!

Brand new writers tend to either forget one of these elements or choose a balance that’s so skewed, one of the elements might as well not be there. They’ll write so much action the story feels like stage direction / alt text on a video, or so much interiority that the protagonist live in their head and the story never advances. There will be so much dialogue that the whole story feels like back-and-forth, or so little that the reader gets told important conversations happen, but never gets to see them.

So little description that the characters might as well be in a white room, or so much that the prose becomes overwrought (ie: purple).

As writers level up, they’ll get better at keeping a hold on all four cords, and tend to balance them more and more evenly throughout the manuscript. However, that initial balance often happens in chunks: a paragraph of action, then a paragraph of description, then a half-page of dialogue, then a paragraph of interiority . . . rinse, repeat. Although chunking can certainly work where appropriate and stylistically necessary, if the prose doesn’t get braided at the sentence or paragraph level, it will eventually begin to feel disjoined and difficult to read.

Practiced writers will move seamlessly between these four narrative elements within a paragraph—sometimes even clause-to-clause in a single sentence! This braiding technique will pull the reader into the story, immerse them in the prose, and make reading feel effortless.

(And for those of us writing genre fiction, effortless is the name of the game!)

In order to determine whether or not you’re effectively braiding your prose, check out one of my favorite exercises:

The Highlighter Exercise

Either on the computer or in a printed copy, pick a scene and four highlighters. The individual colors don’t matter, but for the purposes of this exercise, I’ve chosen:

  • Yellow for action
  • Blue for description
  • Pink/purple for dialogue
  • Green for interiority

Highlight your scenes using these colors. Some writers like highlighting at the sentence level, but I typically go clause-by-clause to get as specific as possible. If I’m on the fence about a phrase, I try to look at what function it serves within the passage and go with my gut.

One you’re finished, you’ll have a clear visual of whether, where, and how you’ve braided narrative styles. Zoom out and look at the colors on the screen (or page):

Are the colors braided? Do you have any blocks of one particular narration style? Are any missing? What kind of narration do you tend to lean on? What impact do you think it’s having on the scene you’re working with? Remember, it’s normal for action to dominate an action scene, or for dialogue to disappear from a scene where the POV character is alone. But if a particular trend persists for pages upon pages, it could be a sign that something isn’t quite right.

My favorite thing about the highlighter exercise is how it takes the guesswork out of assessing my writing. Instead of working off of ‘feel’ or ‘vibes,’ I have a clear picture of my narration style, and can determine whether the balance I’ve chosen suits the story I’m trying to tell.

Of course, not every author’s ‘braid’—nor even every scene written by the same author—will look the same. For the second half of this post, we’ll be doing a deeper dive on the four different narrative styles and taking a look at examples of highlighted, braided passages from four different SFF authors.

Read the rest on Patreon:

Interested in getting a closer look
at my monthly deep-dive?

Become a patron at the AuthorShip+ tiers for craft of writing blogs, Patreon-exclusive videos, Q&A with Cee, discord access, and a (growing) writing community!