Thank you, Linda, for guest posting today on the Blood Red Pencil. The Laws of Physics–er, Writing by Linda Yezak He eyed her from head to toe. She hit him. He smirked. She thought he called her a name. Sounds like a scene from a novel, doesn't it? In truth, these lines are derived from different novels in which the author presented an unanswered action. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” This, the third of Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, should be the first law of writing. Whenever a character does something, there should be some sort of reaction. The examples are from novels I've read where the author left me hanging after an action was portrayed. The first one, especially, yanked me out of the story: "He eyed her from head to toe." Since we were in her POV, we should've seen her reaction (even if we weren't in her POV). Believe me, a woman reacts to being scoped, and how this one reacted could've solidified her ...