Posts from the ‘Storytelling’ Category
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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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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The Situation is the nucleus of your story: it contains the kernel of your conflict from which the rest of your storyline will grow. A real story cannot exist without some sort of conflict. If you have a specific message that you wish to get across (e.g. the destructiveness of superstition), it is that message [...]
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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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A good novel consists of four primary components, all of which interact in an almost symbiotic way. Those elements are plot, character, theme, and style. (The recapitulation of theme-and-plot combined is what I call The Situation.) Of those four components, the first three are primarily concerned with subject-matter, and the last — style, which is [...]
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The best stories are those that can be summed up in one sentence. Said John O’Hara. A solid story hinges upon The Situation. The Situation is not the whole story but the essence of that story’s conflict, which will in turn shape the events of your plot. Here is an example of a situation: On [...]
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Characterization is a presentation of the personality of the people who populate a story. Characterization is primarily a depiction of motivation and motive. The reader must understand what makes the characters act in the way that those characters do. It’s been said that one of the truest tests of good literature is when you can [...]
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