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What does it take to get knighted for your services to literature? For fantasy writer and satirist Sir Terry Pratchett, the answer is a body of work that also earned him the Carnegie Medal, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. Pratchett is best known for his forty-one-book Discworld fantasy series (since adapted …
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With his Western novel The Sisters Brothers currently enjoying a big screen adaptation and his ‘tragedy of manners’ French Exit beloved by the literary establishment, Patrick deWitt is both a proven author and one to watch. Not only that, but deWitt’s story is particularly inspiring to budding writers – a bartender whose manuscript found its way into the right hands after he asked for a patron’s …
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By the end of the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy, things are looking bad for the protagonist. Corrupted by unearned power and driven to desperation by the antagonist, he jumps from the window of his office, tumbling towards the city streets. There’s nothing he can do to avert his fate, the movie hasn’t set up any way of saving him, and then... time stops. The hero blinks, unable to …
[Read more...] about What Is Deus Ex Machina, And Do I Need To Avoid It?
A character’s ‘arc’ describes their internal journey over the course of a story, generally occasioned by the external events they encounter as it unfolds. If the person they are when they begin the book is where they ‘launch’ and the person they are at the end is where they ‘land’, then the path from one to the other is their ‘arc.’ Every fictional character worth their salt, from Harry Potter to …
[Read more...] about Why Do Different Characters Need Different Arcs?
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
I may as well admit it now: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy was, of all the books I read last year, my favorite. It’s clever, serious fiction, but it’s silly, satisfying, and stylish too – it liberally plucks tropes, clichés, and ideas from different genres and plays with then, and its interweaving plotlines wrap around one another before uniting in strange and satisfying ways. Then there’s the …
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