It’s a good question. It’s usually the first thing people ask. So why did it fill me with dread? Why, if someone smiled encouragingly and say “Oh, you’re writing a book? What’s it about?” would I struggle to find a decent response? Was my book doomed?
I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about this over the last couple of months. After a fair amount of soul searching, this article explores the following questions: how do you answer “what is your story about?” and why is it important to find the answer?
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Recently I was involved in an accident (I got hit by a car). I’m ok, I’m not badly hurt, but I’m taking a fair quantity of prescription pain-killers and they’re making me a little groggy.
What does that have to do with anything? Well, I try to get at least one article a month up on this blog. I’d been working on a piece based on the Digital Film Making course I’ve been studying, and I thought it was in good shape in spite of all the drugs I’ve been taking. This morning, realising I was running out of time, I read it over with a view to publishing.
It was not in good shape.
It made no sense. It was full of errors. It was, basically, bad. And this got me thinking.
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For $25 you can not only enter the Atlantis Short Story Competition but also receive 1-2 pages of detailed feedback on your work. But is it worth it? In this article I am going to share the feedback I received when I entered, as well as linking a copy of the story I submitted, and talking about where, how and if I found that it useful. It should give you a good idea of whether you will feel it worth your while to enter, as well as giving you some idea of what sort of things make useful story feedback. (more…)
We learn to read by reading aloud, and we never lose this connection between the oral and the textual[i]. Things that are easier to say are easier to read. And the easier something is to read, the easier it is for the reader to be in the story rather than be stuck on the text. Hard to read sentences may make you sound terribly clever but they also encourage the reader to put your book down and do something else.[ii] This makes reading aloud a vital tool for editing, whether you are trying to polish realistic dialogue or produce beautiful prose. (more…)
How can we tell stories using the spaces around our characters?
For a little while now I’ve been trying out exercises from Scott McCloud’s brilliant book Making Comics[i]. It’s a deeply thoughtful text on the art of storytelling and, with a little imagination, its lessons are just as applicable to the traditional novel as they are to the graphic. I recently shared my first sequential art project, which you can find here. In this article, I’m going to share one of the exercises I completed and use it to talk about telling stories with empty spaces. (more…)
It’s a good question. It’s usually the first thing people ask. So why did it fill me with dread? Why, if someone smiled encouragingly and say “Oh, you’re writing a book? What’s it about?” would I struggle to find a decent response? Was my book doomed?
