Posts from the ‘How to write a novel’ Category
Here’s how you create a setting: One hour before nightfall, on a pink-and-blue evening in the third week of August, 2011 … Here’s how you create a character: a solitary man traveling on foot … Here’s how you introduce a situation: entered the small, tree-shadowed town of Clifton — an isolated village around which many […]
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5. Your storyline is compelling You’ve created a sequence of events that progresses logically and purposefully and that culminates in climax. This sequence is called plot. The plot of a short story can (and probably should) involve just one single incident or main conflict. Conflict is clash. A clash of what? A clash of […]
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Humans spend the majority of their lives inside their own heads, to paraphrase John Milton. One of the primary reasons — and it’s a perfectly legitimate reason — that people give for not finishing a book or a writing project is that they don’t have the time to write. The good news is that at […]
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There is a general structure (of sorts) to storytelling — though if ever you hear it explained in a way that even starts to sound specific or in some other way regimented, walk or run the other direction. This general structure, in turn, is sometimes known as a “formula.” Thus there’s a very general formula […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011