Ask a male author about your male character traits or thoughts.

Amazon links to my stories: The Chess Master, Cinnamon & Sugar, Autumn Breeze, A More Perfect Union, Double Happiness, The Wolves of Sherwood Forest, Neanderthals and the Garden of Eden can be found down the right side of the blog. Another site very useful in categorizing books in their proper order is: https://www.booksradar.com/richard-rw/richard.html


Visit my website at: https://rwrichardnet.wordpress.com/

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Stimulus, organism(s), response

One way and a very good way of writing is to always keep SOR in your thoughts and have it show up on the page.

It could be simple things. I’m currently in my third draft of The Chess Master. Here I copy a scene into Natural Reader (the free version is good enough) I listen and read along as it speaks and take notes. You not only catch missing periods, etc. but catch stilted sentences, missing reactions, or ways to enrich the story.

Not everything written need be reacted to by the other person on the receiving end of the remark or question. Sometimes it’s better to leave the obvious to the imagination of the reader. Especially at the end of a scene.

Stimulus: Something physical and/or mental is happening to your character.

Organism: The body and/or the mind reacts, which must be true to human nature and your character(s). If your character is not human, I always say, wow. That is hard, rewarding, and fun.

Response: Use body language to describe the response unless it is the POV character. The POV character can observe the body language, speculate on its meaning (or not), and also have some body language sprinkled in depending on how in depth you want the action of the moment to go. The none-POV character however can carry it further with extended reactions. Perhaps a fight ensues.

So I listen to my story and I note that the littlest girl in the family does not say anything while an older sister teases her. Okay that’s simple, but I forgot. So the mere sticking out of her tongue enriched the story.

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