Posts Tagged ‘theme’
“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject-matter isn’t the only component of art — nor is it the most complicated — but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. This is true in […]
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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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The situation is the nucleus of your story: it contains the kernel of your conflict from which the rest of your storyline will grow — and a real storyline cannot exist without some sort of conflict. But what exactly is conflict? In writing circles, you hear the word incessantly, and yet you almost never hear […]
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“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject-matter isn’t the only component of art — nor is it the most complicated — but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the […]
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Poetry is a subset of literature, the art form of language, but it also legitimately belongs to another art: music. Poetry is rhyme and rhythm. It is cadence and count, meter and metric. Poetry is prosody. It is scansion. It is versification. And those are the elements of poetry that make it a part of […]
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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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There are 32 ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there’s only one plot: things are not what they seem. – Jim Thompson. Anthony Burgess was slightly less stringent on possible plots: he put the number at about five. What distinguishes one plot from another? Or, to put that question more […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011