Posts Tagged ‘How to write’
Suppose someone were to tell you that you could become a better writer in a single week — would you believe it? Me neither. And yet that’s precisely what I’m about to do. And more: I’m about to make a believer out of you. I tried this on a bet — and lost. Here is how you […]
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Literarily, the meaning of the word plot comes from the Old-French word: complot — which means to conspire. But what actually is plot? 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 […]
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Have you ever heard of Lester Dent, nom-de-plume Kenneth Robeson? He was born in 1904, in La Plata, Missouri, and died fifty-four years later. His writing career spanned a total of thirty years — during which time he managed to crank out an astonishing 175 novels, or more. Still, despite such spectacular fecundity, the names […]
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Do you forget to establish your setting early on? Do you forget to give us The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone? Is your story happy, soft, somber? John Steinbeck does not forget to do this in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men: A few miles south of Soledad, the […]
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Margaret Atwood: Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get […]
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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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(c)Ray Harvey 2011