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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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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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 formula (of sorts) to storytelling, but to be better understood, that formula is best presented in terms of principles, and not concretes. By concretes, I’m referring to these interminable lists of specifics we so often see, which when it comes to the art of story merely tell us what to do […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011