How to write a novel - The Journal Pulp

Posts from the ‘How to write a novel’ Category

Top Five Reasons Your Novel Will Succeed
February 1st, 2013 | How to write a novel | journalpulp | No Comments
Here, in no particular order: 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. And conflict is clash. A clash [...]
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How To Write A Novel: The Fast-And-Furious Version
March 7th, 2012 | How to write a novel | journalpulp | 2 Comments
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 Salt — an isolated village about which many [...]
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Writing Takes Place Inside The Head
September 24th, 2011 | How to write a novel, Plotting | journalpulp | 5 Comments
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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Rules For Writing: Beware The Overly Proscriptive
September 15th, 2011 | How to write a novel | journalpulp | 8 Comments
There is a formula (of sorts) to novel-writing, but that formula should always be framed in terms of principles, and not concretes. By concretes, I’m referring to these interminable lists of specifics we so often see that tell us what to do and what not to do but never give us the principle behind the [...]
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How To Write A Novel: The Fast-And-Furious Version
August 24th, 2011 | Characterization, Dialogue, How to write a novel, Plot, Storytelling | journalpulp | 3 Comments
Here, then, is 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 about [...]
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