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If you’ve been immersed in the writing life for some time now, you’ve probably heard that it’s important to determine what your characters want. As a species, though, humans seem to have a hard time figuring out what we want, much less what our fictional characters want. With that in mind, let’s borrow a concept from the world of theater – the ‘super objective’ – to see if we can dig deep and find …
[Read more...] about How To Identify A Character’s Super Objective (And Why It Matters)
Do you remember story-mapping in grade school? I can picture it now: my bubbly, gel-pen lettering (man, I thought my handwriting was beautiful) inside a few dozen circles, spidered together with linking lines and connecting thoughts. When we got to high school, or college at the latest, our courses became too ‘serious’ for such time-consuming doodles. But maybe instead of junking this process …
[Read more...] about How To Create An Effective Mind Map For Your Book
We live in divisive times. As boundaries between ethnicities, nationalities, social classes, sexualities, and genders are chipped away, the old norms of personal, national, sexual, ethnic, and economic identification and organization must be reevaluated. This is, unsurprisingly, a messy, dramatic, sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately necessary process, and the results impact everything – including …
[Read more...] about What’s A Sensitivity Reader, And Do You Need One?
Fiction has always been a place to explore socially critical, taboo, even transgressive ideas. Sensory extravagance and eroticism go all the way back through literary history, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka brought the themes of sexual deviancy, social isolation, and proto-nihilism into the canon. From there, …
[Read more...] about Writing Transgressive Fiction? Here’s What You Need To Know
Few names in American letters command as much respect as Toni Morrison. The first black woman to win a Nobel Prize, Morrison, rather remarkably for a writer of such prestige, didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine. She wrote this novel – The Bluest Eye – by waking up at four AM every day to write before her two children got up. Then it was off to work. Goodness me. Morrison is …
[Read more...] about 5 Ways Toni Morrison Can Improve Your Writing
In realist writing, villains need to be at least a little relatable (a little sympathetic) in order to be believable. Not all villains have to be sympathetic, of course. Uni-faceted villains can still fill a strong role in the more imaginative or allegorical genres. For instance, we wouldn’t enjoy Edmond Dantès’ epic revenge if Mondego and company were decent chaps who made a few bad choices. But …
[Read more...] about How To Write A Sympathetic Villain
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