Author: Peggy Bechko

Peggy Bechko: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Writers & Readers

Hmm, dude here looks like Gene Roddenberry. Could it be...?
Hmm, dude here looks like Gene Roddenberry. Could it be…?

by Peggy Bechko

Writers and readers have a symbiotic relationship. Each needs the other.

So why, really, do people read? Personally I think most people read to escape, to experience things they might not (or plainly could not) experience in everyday life.  They can explore new worlds if science fiction or fantasy, they can feel the adrenaline rush of a car chase, or a race from an exploding volcano or maybe experience a jungle trek astride an elephant in India without actually going there.  Fiction offers the opportunity to live another life while remaining safe on the couch.

And that’s just for starters. Readers can also experience the wide range of human emotion and deeply moving experience from the safety of a comfortable chair. Or they can relive an event in their lives via the book in their hands. They can do all this while skipping the boring parts, and they have they opportunity to learn from all this without actually suffering through those experiences first hand. read article

Peggy Bechko: Tips for Writing Your Logline or Blurb

by Peggy Bechko

Not this kind of logline. Damn it, you guys!
Not this kind of logline. Damn it, you guys!

Okay writers, time to focus. Whether you write books or scripts or both, you’ve heard this before. You’re going to have to learn to condense. You’ll need to create book blurbs or tweet length synopsis or loglines, or whatever you label it in order to promote your work and sell it.

Don’t go and tell me you’re a novelist and you can’t write anything shorter. I said that once – a long, long time ago – then I learned how to do it.

What are the bare bones of the story you’re trying to tell? How are you going to put that across in just a few words for a ‘high concept’, or a sentence or two for a book blurb? read article

Peggy Bechko: Writers Don’t Wait For Inspiration

hunting club

by Peggy Bechko

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

One of my favorite quotes on writing. I don’t know how many writers still carry that image in their heads that a writer sits around contemplating until struck with a brilliant ideas at which point said writer begins to write in earnest. Hopefully not many.

I don’t know how many readers also have that same image of writers in their heads. To both camps I say, get it out. Stomp that idea to death and do it now. read article

Peggy Bechko: Writers Thinking About Settings

Fantasy

by Peggy Bechko

If you don’t think much about it and just sort of throw settings in as you need there, just for color and background, then maybe you need to pause and think about that again….

Okay, done thinking? Hope you’ve come to some good conclusions, namely just how important settings can be to novel or script. In fact, setting can become so central to a story that it’s almost another character. Think about it – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian series – he created his own Mars.  Settings and characters to go with it. There were precise and detailed settings full of color and life on  their own. And when the movie was made all that detail became real on the screen. And, the director didn’t need to have pages and pages of written instruction to get there.

He also didn’t need a lot of those pages when he has at his fingertips the ability to project lots and lots of images for the ‘reader/watcher’ to absorb. read article

Peggy Bechko: Life’s Disasters, a Writers POV

by Peggy Bechko

I sat myself down to write a blog post and I said to myself, “Self, what to write about?”Leaky_Roof

Then I knew. The leak in the roof. Yes, indeed, living in a flat-roofed house can be challenging. It’s raining. There’s a leak. There’s also a big bubble in the ceiling I had to pierce to let the water out – and more rain is predicted and the roof guy is, well, busy.

So now you’re reading this and you’re saying to yourself what the heck does a leak in the roof, no matter how challenging, have to do with writing? read article