Spend any time around writers’ groups and there are certain conversations you can’t avoid having. Topping the list are debates over genre definitions, discussion of the comparative merits of traditional and self-publishing, and mystification about how certain authors have become…
Blog Archives
Character v Plot: A False Dichotomy
Tagged with: Characters, Lee Child, Plot, Story development, structure, Tripod
Posted in Story development, Wednesday Pontification, Writing
Posted in Story development, Wednesday Pontification, Writing
The Rules and Creatively Breaking them
The rules of writing are a contentious concept. On the one hand, there is no definitive set of rules. On the other, there’s an enormous volume of advice and guidance that is often presented as canonical. There is a great…
Tagged with: Rules, Show don't tell, Story development, structure
Posted in Story development, Wednesday Pontification, Writing
Posted in Story development, Wednesday Pontification, Writing
Which person?
Your fingers are itching to get at that draft by now, but there’s one more choice to make. We need to decide what person the story will be told in. Most of us vaguely remember verb conjugation from school, in…
Outline: the story skeleton
We’re getting very close to the first draft now. There’s one more thing to do and one more choice to make. The thing we need to do is to convert the chronology into an outline. As I said a few…
Tagged with: Cliché detector, Outline, Planning, Plot, Story development, structure
Posted in Story development, Writing
Posted in Story development, Writing
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