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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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