The Story Genius of Moana
If you’ve got (or have ever had) small children in the house, it’s likely you’ve watched and re-watched your fair share of animated movies, possibly to the point where you find yourself singing Frozen songs alone in the car or randomly quoting Finding Nemo at confused retail workers. And while the sixty-gazillionth viewing of the same […]
WRITING EXERCISE: Overheard Voices
Dialogue! One writer’s bane, another’s best friend. Some characters are naturally chatty while others find it hard to string a sentence together. And do they always say what they actually mean? No they flipping well do not. Or, at least, they shouldn’t. To help you nail the talky-talk parts of your writing, here’s a sneak […]
Pep & Prompt #3: How Do I Show, Not Tell?
If you only do one bit of writing this week, make it this
Pep & Prompt #2: Writing Strong Characters
If you only do one bit of writing this week, make it this
Storycraft #6: Ramping Up The Action In Literary Fiction
AKA adventure time for lit ficAKA how conflict doesn’t have to be all FIGHTING AND EXPLOSIONS! Here’s a question we get a lot: “I’m writing literary fiction and nothing really happens – my characters are mostly just standing around talking to each other and thinking about the past – how do I inject a bit […]
Storycraft #5: Sowing Story Seeds
How to engineer a big satisfying payoff for your story with some subtle seeding…
Storycraft #4: Suplots Ahoy
How to build a glorious, complex web of subplots to enhance your story…
Storycraft #2: Narrative Voice
Nailing narrative voice is the key to telling a great story – but sometimes it takes time to find it…
Storycraft #1: Telling A Story
Any fool can tell a story. Humans do it all the time: “Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me on the way to work!” “Omg funny thing about the photocopier…” “Remember that time we woke up in a skip?” But there’s a difference between telling stories, and being A Storyteller. One is the everyday […]
The Dos and Don’ts of Internal Monologuing
Look, there’s a time and place for monologuing. Most of the time we’d say err on the side of LESS, but there are moments when your protagonist really needs to stop and take stock of what the frick is going on. However, we have some provisos. Yes, your story needs downtime now and then. Yes, a […]