CSFF Blog Tour – Randy Ingermanson and Double Vision, Day 4


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Here we are for an unprecedented Day 4 of the CSFF blog tour. Well, that’s not quite true, because our first ever tour, we spent an entire week on our featured site. But since we went to the 3-day format, well, this is certainly ground breaking. 🙂

And rightly so. As I’ve tried to make clear, Randy Ingermanson is a special author, because of his writing, because of his thinking, and because of his mentoring of fellow writers.

It’s a privilege to recognize him and to focus on one of his books, Double Vision.

Much has been said around the tour about Randy’s Snowflake writing method and his award-winning time-travel and space travel novels. Randy even appeared yesterday as a guest blogger at The Bookshelf Review (an especially interesting discussion for those of you who have read Double Vision).

I think one of the key things about Randy’s writing, though, and one reason he’s won the awards and the praise from readers is because of a writing strategy he refers to as MRUs. The letters stand for Motivation-Reaction units.

I hesitate to describe this because I know it won’t make near as much sense as when Randy explains it. The short of it is, every reaction must have a motivation. Reactions are first reflexive (without thought or intend), then internal (thoughts, plans, expectations, etc.), and finally external (actions, dialogue).

It sounds simple, but I’ll tell you, it makes all the difference in moving a story forward. Randy does that better than many a writer. When a reaction comes before the motivation, a reader can be confused and a character can appear to be acting without cause. That pulls readers out of the story.

Anyway, this little tidbit is just a sample of the helpful instruction Randy gives. If you are a writer and interested in improving your craft (I hope that’s all of us! 😀 ), Randy’s resources are invaluable.

And now, on our bonus day, take time to read what the other bloggers have discovered about Randy and Double Vision.

Published in: on March 22, 2007 at 9:52 am  Comments (4)