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Sometimes, you’re midway through a story and you suddenly realize what you need to change to make it work. A later development requires some earlier foreshadowing, or you need to remove a detail so your new path makes sense. It’s a lightbulb moment, and often the point where a story really comes together for many writers, but what do you do if you can’t make the change? In fact, what do you do if …
[Read more...] about ‘Retcon’: How To Rewrite Details In An Ongoing Series
If genre fiction is Die Hard, The Notebook, and The Hangover – stuff you watch to relax and eat popcorn to – literary fiction is the opposite. It’s the Citizen Kane, The Pianist, the There Will Be Blood of the literary world – books you wouldn’t necessarily call a ‘good time’ but that are artistic, intelligent, and affecting on some deep level. To be lazy and reductive: literary fiction is a …
[Read more...] about What You Need To Know About Literary Fiction
When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘inimitable’ is the first word that comes to mind. Multi-time winner of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, and author of The Earthsea Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Word for World Is Forest, her novels are genre-busting spectacles and her poetry explains why poetry is still alive in the 21st century. She’s prolific, …
[Read more...] about 3 Ways Ursula K. Le Guin Can Help You Improve Your Writing
Is there such a thing as actual non-fiction? In short, yes, but it almost always comes in the form of graphs, bone-dry reports, and scientific studies where the authors deliberately fight against a sense of narrative in favor of pure fact. Everything else – diaries, memoirs, historical writing – has a dash of narrative in it, whether it’s in the form of presentation, focus, or content. In its …
[Read more...] about How To Find The Story In Your Non-fiction Project
How do you introduce a character? With an action, with dialogue, via someone else, before they’re even in the scene? The ideal approach depends on the story, but a character sketch – a short passage that focuses on an immediate, extensive description of who the character is and what they look like – is perhaps the most common choice. There’s good reason for that, but while character sketches …
[Read more...] about Is A Character Sketch The Best Way To Introduce Your Characters?
First things first: no, I’m not talking about the Arthur Miller play The Crucible or the film starring Daniel Day-Lewis. There will be no witches or men getting crushed to death by stones here, I’m afraid. Instead, a literary crucible is a narrative mechanism coined by writer James Frey designed to help out writers whose central conflicts are becoming so intense (good for drama) that characters …
[Read more...] about What Is A Crucible, And Why Should You Include One In Your Writing?
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