I had someone ask me about character and story arc, so I thought I’d blog on it today. A novel or story is about the journey of a character from point A to point B. The protagonist starts out his day, smiling under blue skies as he heads to work, but before noon, his entire life is turned upside down. This disaster is the launch or inciting incident of the book. Every book has to have this. Otherwise, the story meanders. What is the story about? What is the story question? You should be able to summarize in a few sentences. Even a literary novel can be summed up quickly if there is a inciting incident that sends that character on a journey. Along the way, the story and character […]
Read the RestArchive | August, 2009
Dialog, Subtexting, Talking Heads
Let’s talk. Dialog. My passion. When I was a preteen, my friends and I created worlds where we were scientist, teachers, single women living in a loft in Minneapolis. (Mary Tyler Moore anyone?) Weight Walkers, our twelve year old version of Weight Watchers. We played out our scenarios in my friend’s basement. In our bedrooms. Outside, riding our bikes. (The Weight Walkers version of make believe.) And without a doubt, the only way our pretend world worked was with dialog. We could motion, gesture, observe each other, pass notes, write on the chalk board and speed past one another on our bikes calling out, “race you!” and never created a make believe world. We had to make up dialog. We had to become characters in our play world. This is […]
Read the RestMeet the Voices: Nick Daniels
Meet the Voices presents Nick Daniels! Nick was born in the late 1970s, in a bustling city in South America. He wrote his first short story in third grade about a explorer lost in the Amazon jungle, then discovered Jules Verne during sixth grade and was hooked into fiction for life. He spent the next few years reading literature classics (mostly Dostoievsky) and contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, plus every book in the library that picked his interest. At age fifteen, he decided to write a novel about a woman who loses the ability to love. It remains (thankfully) unpublished. After graduating from journalism school, Nick moved to the United States to continue his education and write […]
Read the RestBrainstorming: Tips and Tricks
Earlier this week, we talked about crit groups. While I wholeheartedly support critique partners and groups, I’ve found another partnership works best for me. Too often I found my critiques were simply line edits. Receiving more than one or two crits from anyone overwhelmed me, especially working against a deadline. I was wasting people’s time. Several attempts to partner with a friend one-on-one to critique never panned out. Just. Didn’t. Work. After an ACFW conference, several of us got on line to brainstorm. Susie Warren, Tracey Bateman, Christine Lynxwiler and Susan Downs. We had a great time, but it was hard to brainstorm the deeper points in a chat room. And we never got much beyond one person’s story. So, we’d call each and work out the story. Susie was […]
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