Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🎱 Thick Smoke, See Her Smilin' Through... We've all heard the adage: "Show, don't tell." It is, if we're being completely honest with ourselves, a bit over-deployed. It's mainly aimed at the kinds of new writers who think describing events is the same as telling a story, but once you reach a certain level of craft proficiency, you realize that showing versus telling is more about the trade-off. To show something is more engaging, but to tell is more expedient. Sometimes you "tell" in order to preserve pacing. Sometimes you "show" because you can make it into an amusing bit. But sometimes it's best to just do neither... Don't Show, Don't Tell, Cue So why is showing-versus-telling even a thing? The reason has to do with something I talked about in the last post: backstory. Backstory, for the uninitiated, is the necessary context for your story that isn't actually a part of the main plot. This can be everything from world-...

🤐 I'll Never Forget About Larry... As I've mentioned a few times, I work with a lot of new writers, and something that happens not-infrequently is that someone has joined the group because they want to write their memoirs. And I'm not one to talk down to someone who wants to develop their craft as a writer. If someone just wants to collect the stories of their life and are planning to self-publish it and only their family is going to read it (but I repeat myself), that's fine . But if you are actually hoping to make some money from your writing, there's something you're going to need to come to grips with... No One Wants to Read Your Goddamn Memoir Before the pedants descend upon me, let me acknowledge that the words "memoir" and "memoirs" mean different things even though most people use them interchangeably. Technically a memoir is an individual story, and a memoirs is a collection of them. I tend to use whichever word feels right in the m...

🤐 Boy, What a Joker, What a Funny, Funny Guy... There's a lot that goes into telling a joke. Picture yourself at a party, standing around the kitchen, shooting the breeze, and then people start trying to make each other laugh with jokes. It's your turn--all eyes are on you. So you start with the setup. You're hamming up the absurdity a little, and you're taking note of how your audience is responding. If they're enjoying it, you lean in and stretch things out. If their attention is flagging, you move ahead more quickly. You're gesturing, you're doing voices, and you're building up to the big finish. And then you get there. You pause for emphasis. While you deliver it, you raise your voice by a few decibels so every knows that this  is the punchline. And the people laugh. They reward your effort, because, as noted above, there's a lot that went into telling that joke. Now throw all of it away, because none  of it works on paper... You Aren't Funn...

🥊 'Cause I've Still Got a Lot of Fight Left in Me... Some months ago I found myself in a bar sitting between two groups of people involved in separate conversations. On one side, someone was talking about how Hamilton  is overrated. On the other side, someone was talking about how the CW show Supernatural  is overrated. Now, I'm a huge Hamilton  fan, but for some reason the Supernatural  conversation grated on me more. Because I'm pretty sure that show is exactly  correctly rated. No one watching Supernatural  after fifteen seasons is under the impression that this is high art. It is monster-of-the-week melodrama. But, it is exactly what its fans want, and they enjoy it exactly for what it is--which is why it ran for fifteen seasons! Now, I've never seen it, so I can't personally attest to the quality, but the point remains... Stop Bashing Popular Things I promise, this will eventually circle back to craft. When E. L. James's  Fifty Shades of Grey ...

💄 Your Purple Prose Just Gives You Away... This is the final installment in my trilogy on line-editing. If you want to see these ideas in action, you can check out a demonstration I did several years ago for Flights of Foundry  in which I apply these principles to the opening paragraph of Fifty Shades of Grey . Edit For Aesthetic Third It's tempting to think, since aesthetic is third on my list of things to edit for, that it's not all that important. So let me clear the air right up front. Aesthetic is extremely  important. In fact, you might say that it's more important than everything but clarity and word-economy. This is because the word  aesthetic  is covering a lot of ground here. Style and tone? Aesthetic. Format? Aesthetic. Genre conventions? Also (often) aesthetic. It's a broad umbrella, but all of these have one thing in common: a key part of your story is the way  you tell it. This extends to the aesthetic of your writing because the way you wri...

💰 It's the Economy, Stupid... It's funny what gets lodged in your brain. There's a line from the Steven Soderbergh movie Ocean's 11  that I find myself coming back to frequently. It's just before the start of Act 3, when Rusty (Brad Pitt) is prepping Linus (Matt Damon) for his role in the heist. One of the pieces of advice he gives is "Don't use seven words when four will do." And this stuck with me, not because it was particularly important to that scene, but just because it felt like, I dunno... solid life advice? So naturally it found its way into my philosophy about writing, and that's why we... Edit For Economy Second Way back in my post about Writing to a Word Count , I talked about economy in writing, and how the idea of "word-economy" stays forefront in my mind while drafting and editing. Word-economy isn't about using the fewest  words, it's about making the most effective use of your words. The idea goes back (like eve...

☀️ I Can See All Obstacles in my Way... Bit of housekeeping up at the top here: I have indeed burned through more material than I'd expected in the first quarter of the year, so I'm going to be dropping back to one post every other week for at least a little while. The editorial board apologizes for any inconvenience. Edit For Clarity First "Editing" is one of those terms that is used to cover so many bases that it has almost become meaningless. The person who buys stories, the person who helps develop stories, the person who checks spelling and punctuation, the person who checks for continuity, the person who looks at word choice and sentence structure--all of these people have "editor" in their job title. So needs must that we hone in on one, and over the next few posts, I'm going to be looking at my favorite of these: line-editing. Or "wordsmithing," if you like. Now, most authors find line-editing to be a chore. I love it. I love it so muc...

📻 Girls, rock your boys, get wild, wild, wild... I've blogged before about how, in art, form follows format . If I may quote myself: "...there's a reason hour-long television shows used to have a 4-act structure with A and B plots--they were built around commercial breaks and you needed things to cut between. Then, with the rise of prestige television and on-demand streaming, that formula largely disappeared and was replaced with serialized cinematic storytelling because that's more bingeable." This holds true across media, and right now fiction is cross-format, existing in print, digital print, and audio. The preferred format is still print, but I have a feeling that this is going to change in a few years and that we should all... Write for Audio Let me first admit my bias. The physical act of reading has always been a bit of a struggle for me (hellooooooo ADHD), so I consume most of the books I read as audio. And there are certain things that books do when tran...