I’m using Terry Bissom’s “They’re Made of Meat” as a teaching story for dialogue next week. <g> All dialogue, all the time — it doesn’t even have attribution for the speakers.

and i do still like my “ly” words once in a while.
and sometimes i’ll even fall slightly out of
3rd close pov.

New writers should get into the habit of really really really looking at how prose goes together…and of course, they should look at the work of many different writers to see the range of possibilities.

I actually think this is a good rule to present as if it’s infallible when somebody’s getting started, because you really need to get it through their heads, and beginning writers are often confused by “do this, except you can also do this, but only when thus-and-such, and really it’s all subjective and we do it by instinct.” Rules are easier to hold onto and learn from. But that’s when I’m teaching the concepts; in actual critique, I tailor what I say to what the story needs, and therefore also to how well the writer is deploying (or not deploying) the rule.

As for the above-thread comment about adverbs and POV — heh. I already blew up the adverb one in the first week of class, saying you shouldn’t be using them as crutches, but I have no patience with those who would drum them out of our parts of speech entirely. And the iron-hard POV rule I told them was, “don’t lose your reader.” If you can float indiscriminately from head to head in such a fashion as to bring your reader along without a hitch, and that’s what your story needs, then go for it!

I once had a critter tell me that I’d never see my third-person omniscient stories in print. The fact is, different techniques work for different kinds of stories, and you should never refuse to look at any of them.

I’m still battling the show vs tell bug, but on a more basic level. My tendency is to put a paragraph of ‘tell’ extrapolation to cover the boring but necessary bits to get from point A to point B in a scene or between scenes. My crit reader was less than happy w/ me for that so now I’m going back in to figure out how to make those links w/o gratuitous telling.

Is it an obvious trick in SF to plop a stranger into the world/universe so that the reader has someone to relate to (and someone who can translate the oddities of this new world for them?)