Density isn’t something that often gets talked about, but it is one of the first things a reader notices about a book and one of the last things – sometimes years later – they remember about it. Writers dream of readers. They picture someone reading what they have written – if the writer is lucky, […]
Let’s spend a moment examining what story-time means for one particular genre: horror. (Some generalisations follow. Not all horror novels may conform, I realise.) The story-time of a horror novel depends upon a specific form of suspense, namely dread. Horror novels are dread-ful. But we can subdivide them in terms of microgenres, in terms of […]
STORY TIME REDUX We’ve already begun to think about stories and time and how they fit together, how they are sometimes the same thing – story-time. Not all story-times are the same. And this is where I would like to propose a different way for you to think about your own writing, and a different […]
Here is a non-story. A waiter works in the café at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Every smoking break, he goes and looks at the view. Afterwards, he goes back inside the café and continues serving customers. Here is a story. An old Korean woman who lives in North Korea has a […]
BUT THAT JUST WOULDN’T HAPPEN – IT’S NOT AT ALL REALISTIC Oh dear. It’s like Mr But has taken over the section titles. He’s making a bid for total power. Mr But has more to say. I’m going to let him speak for as long as he wants: You’re taking examples from Hollywood movies – […]
Pushing further away from expositional dialogue, we come to what I call ‘hip’ dialogue. Hip-speech is a version of slang, similar to criminal slang – it is a way of communicating without fear of being overheard and understood. The jazz musician Lester Young came up with or popularized a lot of hip language – language […]
Writers are usually much better at spotting, and mocking, exposition in the work of other writers. In their own work, sections of disguised address to the reader (a.k.a. info-dump) are simply jobs that have to be done, one way or the other. It is a truth of writing that sometimes the ugly way is the […]
EVERYTHING IS DIALOGUE I don’t just mean two people in a book talking, and it being received in written down form. By ‘Everything is dialogue’, I mean that if your writing has the sense of different voices intruding on one another – not always monologuing, not always singing in the same key – it will […]
ALL BY YOURSELF One of the biggest faults in stories by less experienced writers is that they are about extremely isolated people – people who start off by being isolated and don’t end up making much contact with others. This is not, in itself, a bad idea. There have been many wonderful stories about people […]
We’re now going to look at some ways you can work on making the people you write about feel real and, if it’s what you need, likeable. PEOPLE? It might be easier to start referring to them as characters, but I’m going to stick with people, so as to keep them on the same level […]
