To many writers, conflict is the basic unit of story – the thing that turns a series of events into an actual narrative – often more important than setting, characters, and even narrative cohesion. After all, you can lose all of those features of a story and still write something that grips the reader.
Suspension of disbelief is a natural impulse – not something you have to help your reader achieve, but rather something you have to avoid ruining.
Whether you’re writing fiction, non-fiction, or something in-between, it’s likely that, at some point, your characters are going to start talking. That’s your book’s dialogue, and what’s tricky about it is that it comes with its own set of rules, tangential to regular prose.
Hot-headed, outspoken, and litigious, Ellison was a source of a lot of advice in his lifetime, and so today we’ll be sifting through his thoughts and exploring what modern authors can learn
