Author Archive
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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The following questions were submitted to me some time ago by Mr. Maxwell Hoaglund, of Slagheap magazine. I publish it here with Mr. Hoaglund’s full knowledge and permission. Q: If your finger isn’t typing, where is it? Ray Harvey: It’s on the pulse of the people. Q: Are you really a bartender? Ray Harvey: […]
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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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I once knew a girl named Poetry. Everyone called her Poe. Everyone except me. I called her Poetry. I asked Poetry one day if she knew the meaning of her name, and she said yes: “To make,” Poetry said, and Poetry was right. The word “poetry,” from the Greek poiein, means exactly that: “to create, […]
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Establish your setting early on. Give us The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone. Is your story happy, soft, somber? John Steinbeck does this so well in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men: A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and […]
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“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]
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A good novel consists of four primary components, all of which interact in an interdependent and 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 […]
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Charles Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed. When Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin Virginia, he was twenty-seven, and she was thirteen. And consumptive. The genius poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wanted to change his name to Pook Tunks. Robert Frost had only five poems accepted in his first seventeen years of writing and […]
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The best stories are those that can be summed up in one sentence. Which is to say, a solid story hinges upon its 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: […]
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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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[Note: I’ve updated this post and changed the dialogue example] In Part 1 of this post, I mentioned that a fictional character is shaped by his or her words and actions, and that for this reason, plot and dialogue are the sine-qua-non of character development. The following, then, taken from an actual book (written in […]
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If plot is the skeleton — that vital framework upon which the rest of the body is built — then characters are the soul. Characters are the reason we ultimately love or hate a story. “I’m sick to death of the inarticulate hero,” said John Fowles. “To hell with the inarticulate.” Characterization is in essence […]
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Stories are important because human beings are conceptual. This among other things means that humans survive by use of their reasoning brains. Humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws of bears, nor the necks of giraffes, but the brains of Homo sapiens, with a capacity to think. […]
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If you want to rivet readers, you must give readers something to worry about. Make the reader nervous. Make her feel intrigued. Make her curious. This issue, which is very closely associated with plot, is called suspense. Suspense is when your eyes are nailed to the screen. It’s when you’re coming out of your seat. […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011