Posts from the ‘Plot’ Category
Plot is complicated. The more I think about plot, the more complicated it gets. Plot is the method by which you present your story. Plot is a vehicle. Plot is a purposeful sequence of events — and in a well-plotted story, those events all connect logically and culminate in a specific goal, or climax. “Life [...]
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He was the only child of middle-aged parents, a miner-turned-truck-driver named Neil and Neil’s wife Angela, a half Cherokee lady of rare beauty whom Joel loved with all his heart. He grew up silent, a silent child, pale and skinny but healthy. He brought coal from the shed to the stoker. He took out clinkers. [...]
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Holding the reader’s attention is the total goal, and among the most effective ways to do this is by creating what I’ve come to call A Thread of Apprehension. Give your readers something to fret over. Here, from a Booker-Prize winning novel called The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch, is an excellent example: The [...]
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Plot is not memoir. Plot is not diary. Plot is not journal. Plot is not history. Plot is not erotica. Plot is not dialogue. Plot is not essay. Plot is not philosophy. Plot is not chronicle. Plot is not action alone. Plot is something very specific: it is the method by which you present your [...]
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Seven o’clock in the evening. A hot and moth-populated mountain night. Gasteneau sat alone in a rundown motel on the outskirts of town, a cheap room that he’d rented for this reason, because it was cheap, and because he could have it by the day or by the week, and because it was spacious and [...]
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Suspense, which isn’t a genre but a specific manifestation of plot, is when you can’t put the book down because you must learn what happens next. Suspense is when you’re champing at the bit. Here are five ways to keep readers in suspense: 5. Arrange your events in such a way that readers will wonder [...]
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Life is an unceasing sequence of single actions, said Ludwig von Mises. And so is plot. But unlike life, plot is selective — and what that means, among other things, is that the author is the selector. The author chooses the actions his characters undertake. This, incidentally, is one of the primary ways in which [...]
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A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Well, it took me five months but I finally finished reading More and More unto the Perfect Day and I wish to compliment you! Though it is a challenging and not easy read, it is rewarding and gives much food for thought to say the least. Your story reminded [...]
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Anton Chekhov answered that question this way: You could write a story about this ashtray, and a man and a woman. The man and the woman are always the two poles of your story. The North Pole and the South. Every story has these two poles — a he and she. The late Raymond Carver, [...]
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There’s a game that certain writers like to play, and it’s not called Hide-The-Salami (although that game is popular among certain writers as well, myself perhaps foremost among them). In the game I’m talking about, someone — anyone — comes up with a random list of words or components, and the writer is then asked [...]
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