Above all, the first draft of a story is meant to be an icky, gloopy mess. And when you’ve completed it, you do, indeed, have an honest-to-gobstoppers gen-yoo-ine story on your hands.
But. You still need to shape that amorphous blob of words into something approachable, let alone digestible, for anyone else. And that is where your toolbox comes in…
Tweet Yesterday I explained why you need to know the plot points in your work-in-progress. If you use them right, they can make your story easier to tell and for more compelling to read. Design a Plot Point Like most aspects of writing, all that power and convenience while you’re writing comes directly from the […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about my rites of passage, about the moments in my life when I grew up. They were turning points in my personal history, and both of them significantly changed my plot. Today I want to tell you a little bit about the ways writers capture that slice of the […]
Tweet I’ve talked before about arguments I lost to my dad (the expert debater) back in high school. I can vividly remember the last of those. Well…not the last argument I lost to my dad (which is, God willing, still many, many years in the future), but the last argument I lost in high school. […]
Last month, I spent an indeterminate, yet still large number of hours drawing trees for Julie of Julie V. Photography… The experience left me ruminating upon some of the clear parallel between my drawing craft and my writing craft. Gather ’round, my dearest inklings, and I shall share with you the wisdom the aforementioned parallel doth impart…
Tweet This week I’m talking about inviolable writing rules (and ranting against the storytelling in The Da Vinci Code). Yesterday I provided a list of rules that I said you should never break, then I admitted that most books break at least one of those, and I closed by saying, “Well, fine, you can break […]
Tweet Okay, first things first, I keep forgetting that I’ve got readers who have never taken a Creative Writing class. If you missed out on that (and, I guess, Latin classes too), then yesterday’s post ended with a much more mysterious cliffhanger than I intended. And, worse, I’m not actually going to get into detail […]
Tweet One lazy Saturday a couple months ago I emerged from a couple hours of writing in the office to find Trish sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Da Vinci Code. She’d seen it before — I’m pretty sure I went to see it at the theater with her — and […]
We of the storytelling craft often use the term “thread” when discussing the thematic elements that hold our tale together. It’s a perfect metaphor, because we do, indeed, weave those elements in and out of the plot, binding characters and events together into a unified whole. But problems arise during the weaving because we use the wrong threads…
Tweet So there you have it. The Consortium, in all its glory. It took me a month of posts to make the case for it (and right at my 800-word limit just to share the executive summary of my business plan yesterday), but I hope among them all you’ve got a pretty good idea what […]
