Posts on the craft of writing
According to Christine Frazier’s Better Novel Project you need twenty characters to start a book. Her post advocates this as an essential kick-starter for pop-fiction. It cites first chapters for Harry Potter and The Hunger Games (19 each) and Twilight (24). Even generalising for genre-fiction, twenty characters in Chapter One seems a bit much.
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Iconic author Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing Fiction are practical, humourous and endearing; much like the man himself. …
How many times do you edit and revise, and still wonder how to fix a bad scene in your manuscript. Been there, struggled with that. You don’t always know why it doesn’t work, but that feeling won’t go away. …
Storyboard artist Emma Coats compiled a list on Twitter of Pixar’s twenty-two rules of storytelling. It’s not a new list (2012?) but it does contain some timeless wisdom. So here’s a shameless lift of that list:
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There’s a piece of writing advice which goes ‘do the worst thing to your protagonist you can think of.’
Taken literally, you end up in murder, torture, kidnapping, earthquake, fire and flood. Not exactly genre-appropriate if you’re writing The Ladies’ Sewing Circle Diaries. Or a rom-com. …
I’ve been challenged to write an epic fantasy genre story, so I’m reading a lot of current fantasy fiction. It varies from ‘meh’ to ‘aarrrgghh!’ not only for the quality of the writing, but the vast number of fantasy genre tropes we love and hate.
A trope is any type of figure of speech, theme, image, character, or plot element that is used many times. All genres have them, but the fantasy genre is piled higher than Khazad Dum (too geeky already?).
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A dense wall of text with little or no white space sends readers running; so how long is a paragraph?. Online and digital devices mean short paragraphs are the new standard.
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Writers recommend many different story structures including the classic story in seventeen chapters. It’s built around the Fichtean curve and employs three to four moments of crisis. Each escalates and raises the stakes.
It makes for fast-paced stories and works well across genres. …
If this is the Self Publishing Journey Part II, then what happened to Part I?
Writing something is part one. Working out what to do with it is part two.
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Proving how certain genres defy definition, here’s my fourth attempt to define the magic in magical realism.
I struggled so much with this, I’m leaning into the Masterclass definition: …