The Revelation of Misbelief
Book One stalled for a while because I didn’t know how to handle the revelation of misbelief. In my defense, I didn’t acknowledge the place of misbelief in story telling.
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Book One stalled for a while because I didn’t know how to handle the revelation of misbelief. In my defense, I didn’t acknowledge the place of misbelief in story telling.
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A key question in fiction: where does your protagonist sit on the proactivity scale? Do they pursue goals beyond the everyday? Survival or escape by themselves aren’t active goals. Something has to drive change and transformation, to become better by the end than they started at the beginning.
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Avoiding the Idiot Plot: in which characters behave like idiots. Logic and good sense go AWOL. Along with the reader’s patience.
Typically, Idiot Plots derive from non-communication and mis-communication amongst the characters. Often, in the Idiot Plot, one sentence could wrap up the entire thing before the end of Act One.
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Author and writing coach Joe Nassise brings us The Three C’s of Story: Characters, Conflict and Consequences.
His analysis is so simple, it approaches genius. Nassise lays out three elements:
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Among the takeaways from Brandon Sanderson’s writing course are five components of dialogue. People talk, it’s a vital part of human communication. But writing good dialogue in fiction isn’t easy. Just watch ten minutes of Rings of Power.
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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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Writing a fantasy series, there’s no way I can ignore the conventions of the Action genre. A solid action piece has to include some mandatory ingredients of plot, character and theme. Scratch the surface and you’ll find I write all the tropes of a classic Western. With swords.
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Let’s compare the wildly popular Black Widow and the (unfairly in my view) not wildly popular Captain Marvel. Then look at who I have in my fantasy series.
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This week I found the key in completing a character arc: misbelief. It followed two years of writing, ignoring that my protagonist wasn’t working.
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Why do we so love the stories in which Everyman saves the day? Recalling a previous post, the Everyman – or in my stories, Everywoman – is a character who is ordinary enough to be relatable to the average reader.
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