Finishing my Novel and NaNoWriMo 2020
Over the weekend I finished work on the rough draft of my first novel, Daughter of Spades. It’s still a…
Tag: writing (page 5)
Should a Writer be a Literary Critic?
Writers can benefit from understanding literary criticism, but as with everything else it has a cost. Writing well requires understanding.…
Writing as Habit
Writing as a habit is critical to success: it lets you form a lasting relationship with your work process that can yield rewards in output and satisfaction.
A Metahuman Theory of Literature
Hypothesis: Literature serves to address questions of beyond human scope. From this I derive the term metahuman: the Greek term…
Markets, Styles, and Genres
Writers who want to publish books often overlook a critical step of the publishing process. Everyone is familiar with books,…
Respect Your Audience by Dumbing Down
Good writing is clear writing. A mistake common to authors is the idea that complicated ideas require complicated presentation. That…
Nonlinear Narratives and You
I’ve been talking about my bubble method of doing organization for a while now, but today I want to talk about something that’s useful for creative writers: nonlinearity.
Nonlinear stories can hold a lot of interest and have some practical advantages. It puts the storyteller entirely in control of pacing and the flow of information.
But it’s also difficult. The storyteller needs to be great at information control and keeping tones steady.
Choosing a Subject: Resolution
The resolution of a work is critical for its success.
The theme and message of the work need to carry through to the end of a story. Even for fiction writers who focus on mere entertainment, a resolution provides satisfaction to the audience.
Without a resolution, a story feels incomplete, and that’s undesirable in all but very specific circumstances.
This is the fourth part of my series on how to narrow down subjects for writing (see the rest through this link).
Bubbles and Scenes
One of the fundamental differences between most writing and creative writing is that creative writing has a much different purpose.
While both convey functional information, the goal in creative writing is to provide an artistic expression beyond the mere literal events.
If you’ve been following my bubble method (click here for an archive of posts), you’ll know that it’s a light and fractal organization method I use to help stay on task and hit every point I need to hit.
But keeping things straight only gets you half-way to solid organization in creative writing.
For that, you need to think between the bubbles.
Choosing a Subject: Crisis
The crisis is the ultimate point of tension in a literary work. It’s when the big bad guy and the big good guy face off, and to the victor go the spoils.
If you want to write a story, you need a good crisis point.
In fact, when you leave a story feeling unfulfilled, it’s almost certainly because the climactic moment of the story didn’t live up to its role.
This is the third part in my series about narrowing down subjects for a creative writing project. Previously I discussed this with the initiation and development of a story.