Justina Ireland, On Openings – A Twitter Thread
Justina Ireland; @justinaireland, March 13, 2018 Writers, gather round. Let’s talk about openings. Most especially: establishing scenes and the promise of the story. The promise of the story is the aboutness of your book. Not necessarily the theme, it’s the point of the story. At some point the conventional wisdom became that writers should start their stories as close to the inciting incident as possible. And while true, that doesn’t mean you… Read More
Top 5 Developmental Issues by Naomi Hughes
This thread was posted by Naomi Hughes (@NaomiHughesYA) on twitter. You should follow her! This thread is also available from the Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) on twitter. I haven’t done a writing-advice thread in a while because I was so busy working on my WIP, but now that I’m done, how about a chat on the top 5 developmental issues I see as an editor? One of the most common issues I see in manuscripts I edit is… Read More
Scene Craft by Naomi Hughes
This thread was posted by Naomi Hughes (@NaomiHughesYA) on twitter. You should follow her! This thread is also available from the Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) on twitter. Today, let’s chat about the most common problems I see at the next stage of editing: scene craft! Scene craft is something that you can definitely build into your manuscript from draft 1. It’s all about keeping the reader riveted at the scene-by-scene level, even if nothing… Read More
The 9 Types Of Unreliable Narrator, by Amanda Patterson
From: https://writerswrite.co.za/9-types-of-unreliable-narrator I was stunned by the success of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It was obvious to me that the author was employing the unreliable narrator technique in the story. This came as a shock to many readers and viewers, which is odd when everyone tells you that there are at least two sides to every story. There is a long history of unreliable narrators in fiction. There is an even longer list in… Read More
The Essential Ingredient of Hard Choices, by Chuck Wendig
N.B. This is a sanitized version of the essay by Chuck Wendig; please see the original for the more colorful Wendig. From: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/11/07/the-essential-ingredient-of-hard-choices I knew a guy named Gil who faced an incredibly difficult decision: his wife and his teenage daughter were both in the hospital at the same time with failing kidneys, the wife from cancer, the daughter from the trauma of a car accident. Grim coincidence, indeed. Both required a kidney… Read More
The Key Ingredient for Dramatic Tension–Understanding the Antagonist, by Kristen Lamb
By Author Kristen Lamb, posted in Antagonist on April 23, 2012 From: https://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/tag/role-of-the-antagonist Today I wanted to take some time to talk about the antagonist. Why? Well, not only is the antagonist THE most important character, but he is the most misunderstood as well. […] Whenever I blog about the antagonist, I generally get one of the following: “Well, my character is the antagonist. She is her own worst enemy.” “What if… Read More
Storytelling Strategies: Spotlighting Inner Conflict, by Paul Joseph Gulino
January 25, 2016 From: http://www.scriptmag.com/features/storytelling-strategies-spotlighting-inner-conflict Do your characters need an arc or inner conflict to make a screenplay work? Spotlight (written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy and directed by McCarthy) has been nominated for a slew of awards, including Oscars in Best Picture and Best Writing categories. The obvious reason for the attention is that it is a polished, well-crafted, and engaging film. Very likely, another reason is the subject matter:… Read More
Levels of Conflict, by John Vorhaus
From: http://writerunboxed.com/2013/07/25/levels-of-conflict By John Vorhaus on Jul 25 2013 at WriterUnboxed.com Whenever I have a problem I can’t solve, I immediately try to break it down into smaller, component problems. And I keep breaking problems down until I find one small enough to solve. This is a strategy I use over and over again when trying to get to the heart of the conflict of a story or scene I’m writing. For… Read More
Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling
Recommended by Randy LaBarge. From: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveals-the-six-basic-emotional-arcs-of-storytelling by Emerging Technology from the arXiv; July 6, 2016. Scientists at the Computational Story Laboratory have analyzed novels to identify the building blocks of all stories. Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into… Read More
Insights Into Advanced Fiction Structure, by Donald Maass
From PNWA Master Class, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, via DeeAnna Galbraith All about building layers and surprising the reader with something they didn’t expect Character Work/Openings Is your protagonist: An everyman? What quality in the life of the author can be shown in this type of character almost immediately? Are they in control, too busy, boring job? Already a hero or heroine? What is this character’s everyday human quality? Put this… Read More