Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🖼️ Could You Take a Picture, 'Cause I Won't Remember... I think it's time for you to meet Steve. Steve is a CPA in his mid-twenties. He has sunken green eyes and a seemingly permanent 5 o'clock shadow. His sandy brown hair is unkempt. He wears an un-ironed white button-up shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows and a red tie that sits loose in his collar. He likes fast food and vinyl. He has a bare bones apartment and a compact car. Steve... sounds real boring, right? Describe With Actions Most writers view description as a necessary evil. It's not fun to write--or to read--but if you want your reader to be able to picture the scene in their heads you have to give them something  to work with. So you pick a few important details and string them into a paragraph and plop it somewhere near the character's introduction. It's not interesting, but if you keep it short you won't use up too much of your reader's attention budget . Besides, readers are accu...

👄 People Are Talkin', Talkin' 'Bout People... Want to write better dialog? Well, there's no shortage of advice out there to guide you. Avoid maid-and-butler exchanges. Listen to how people speak, perhaps by making recordings in public. Try writing a story that's only  dialog. Read They're Made Out of Meat  by Terry Bisson for inspiration. Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't need any of that. I mean, read Bisson's story--it's short and it's quite good, but you're not necessarily going to learn anything earth-shattering from it. If you want to write good dialog, there's one simple rule you need to follow. Motivate Your Dialog I talk a lot about movies. For one, it's the default way that most people consume their fiction these days. It's a lot easier to find cultural touchstones in film than on the page. And for broad story analysis, film is great! But it does operate at a different wavelength than prose does, and what I f...

🕳️ ...In My Heart That Can Only Be Filled By You... There's a fantastic moment in Wonder Woman  where Diana first uses her powers. She's surrounded by friends and family and they all react without speaking in a way that conveys that they love her but are also terrified of her. It's a great scene--and I'm a sucker for good "face acting" anyway--and at that moment I knew that I was going to be on board for whatever this movie had to dole out. My wife, however, was not affected the same way, and the movie on the whole just wasn't working for her. Throughout it she would lean over and point out inconsistencies or anachronisms or continuity gaffes (we were in our living room, not a theater; she's not a monster). And the thing was... nothing she said was wrong. I just hadn't noticed any of them and didn't really care. And that was when I realized... Plot Holes Don't Matter Blame CinemaSins. Er... well, that's not entirely fair. There's a...

🎥 I Can See By Your Eyes You Must Be Lying... I love bad things. For the last few years I've spent New Year's Eve marathoning bad movies. I did an entire year-long blog series about movies, TV shows, books, and more than I don't like. (It was, frankly, a little exhausting.) Why do I do this? For the irony? For the schadenfreude? For the LULZ? No! Well... maybe a little. But, really, what fascinates me about horrible things is the mental autopsy of trying to understand what the vision was for the project, and how the execution went so horribly wrong. It's pretty common for ADHDers such as myself to have an exceptionally strong desire to understand how things fit together. And for me, I want to know how storytelling works, and that means understanding how it fails. Watch Bad Movies The first step to becoming a writer is reading, so they say. Read classics. Read what's new and hot. Read up on your genre. Read outside your genre. Read so you can figure out what works ...