The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón My rating: 3 of 5 stars First let me say that I enjoyed this book well enough and was, again and again, willing to forgive technical issues that leapt off the page because, yes, Zafon has a lovely turn of phrase and, yes, the opening of…
This week’s #Storycraft chat topic was “Why do we want to publish our work? Do we have an omni-premise?” Omni-premise is a term coined by Kim @Last_Lines Koning in a blog post she was inspired to write after last week’s “Premise” topic. The omni-premise is a premise which we find drives much, if not all,…
On Tuesday, I posted a piece about this week’s #Storycraft chat and invited any readers interested to join us. I realise, now that I’ve only discussed #storycraft in passing, on this blog, having kept the two blogs quite separate for almost a year, so I thought a very little more explanation might be in order….
This week’s #Storycraft was a doozie! We discussed the very precise and hugely important topic of the Premise (a la Lajos Egri) and the #storycrafters got stuck right in (and stuck it out, when it got tough.) I think we all learned a lot. If you’re interested, the transcript of the chat can be found…
The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction by John Dufresne My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth is an excellent guide to the craft, I enjoyed the philosophy, but I would suggest that it is more for those who are theory novices (as distinct from…
NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and each November since 1999, writers around the world (it really should be INNoWriMo by now) have signed up to be challenged, cheered or harangued (whatever works for you) by each other to write 50,000 words of a novel (or a whole novella) from November 1st to…
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man,1871 For as long as I can remember, I have been desperately concerned with my level of metacognitive skill. It was the reason I gave the first story I ever wrote for public consumption to my best friend to critique, I…
We all know that the best way to teach is to engage and entertain with the material – this book does it in spades; I couldn’t put it down! Rather than write another how-to book, Mittelmark and Newman have produced a book in a format which will be familiar to TV Tropes readers, naming, describing…
Even if we don’t write historical stories, or military suspense with technical details, all writers have one subject which they must all research: happiness and how humans pursue it. Even the most evil of evil villains, we believe, is motivated by their own belief that their actions will bring them some form of happiness. In this…
A post at Betsy Lerner’s wonderful blog, today, asked why those of us afflicted with narrative disorder at a young age began to write. It sparked a memory of the very first time I ever showed my writing to anyone and, since upon leaving Japan this blog will return to focusing more on its original…
