With a prequel novella in the works for my fantasy series, I’m finding more troubles with prequels.
Prequels naturally take place before a story that’s already written. This could be two centuries (House of the Dragon), or a few days (Rogue One). The core problem with prequels is the ‘before-ness’ of the story.
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Lisa Cron guested on a podcast last year discussing internality and backstory, where story lives and breathes.
Listening back to Joanna Penn’s interview from 2021, writer and coach Lisa Cron asked ‘why does story matter in every book we write, no matter the genre?’
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Here is the difference between passive and active characters; decision-making and agency.
Passive characters meander through a story while stuff happens to them and all they do is react. Proactive characters take decisions and make stuff happen for themselves.
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Crafting Distinct Voices sets nine questions designed to tease out a distinctive voice for individual characters. Given the sparse dialogue I’m writing in my fantasy series, any prompts are worth considering.
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I worked out the central premise of Amazon’s Rings of Power: Galadriel’s Study in Psychopathy.
I resisted talking about this because it’s become mired in gender politics almost as toxic as Republicans versus Democrats. Let’s ignore the politics and call it what it is: bad writing.
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According to the late teacher and script doctor Peter Russell, the character’s core wound powers the story. Writing and speaking extensively on TV and film scripts, Russell advocates a character-first approach to storytelling.
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Mister Rabbit resulted from a set writing prompt: a children’s story for 5-8 year-olds, no more than 500 words, containing rabbit, ice cream, river; third person, past tense, containing both description and narrative. …
Crowd-funding is fine; the trouble with crowd-funding is finding the crowd…
Platforms such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe turned crowd-funding into a viable business model for all kinds of ventures over the last decade. So what about books? …
The Green Vase is from a flash fiction prompt based on the cumulative sentence. It’s not about the green vase at all. …
It’s a rare item of writing craft that finds me introducing the cumulative sentence.
I had a “progressive” education, which meant I wasn’t taught grammar and punctuation or any of the glue that binds language together. I’ve had to discover it for myself. That goes for the cumulative sentence. Stick with me, it’s not that technical. You might even like it.
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