Hitting rock bottom. The whiff of death. The point of no return. Whatever term you prefer to describe it, you’ll certainly have come across countless ‘All Is Lost’ moments in fiction. It’s the moment when Frodo loses his nerve to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The moment when Charlie Bucket
Inciting incident, key event, plot point… they’re useful terms for those who are comfortable with them, but more often than not, they’re treated as if they’re interchangeable. Sadly, these are terms that authors have treated pretty poorly over the years. They’ve swapped places, been used as synonyms, and eventually ended up as a homogeneous mass that
If you’ve ever read an authors’ ‘How To’ book, attended a creative writing class or pretty much sought writing advice of any kind ever, you’re bound to have run into this phrase: ‘always start with the action’. It’s probably as ubiquitous as ‘show don’t tell’ and ‘do not, under any circumstances, use Comic Sans. EVER’.
I think most creative people have trouble throwing things away. Not in a hoarder-esque, ‘I’m currently typing this while walled-in by newspaper towers’ kind of way. No, it’s more ‘waste not, want not’ practicality than kleptomaniac-tinted nostalgia. It’s that lingering feeling: ‘Surely this will be useful, later.’ This same feeling can apply to your writing ideas,
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