“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
With the first fifteen words of her novel The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood takes a vice-like grip on the reader. She doesn’t let you go until the last page. It is a powerful book, deeply emotive, and, for my money, has an opening line that rates right up there with Rebecca’s “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But what makes it so good? Why does it press all the buttons needed for an effective opening? And what can we do to evoke that sort of sympathy from the first page?
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Some stories touch us. A great story can make us laugh out loud, grieve for the death of someone who never existed, or even burst in to tears in the window seat of a train. But why does it happen? And, as a writer, how can you make it happen?
In this post, I will consider Peter Stockwell’s “Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation” and how to practically apply some of his ideas in your writing. Do you want to know what it takes to make your readers cry? Read on.
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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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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…)
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Early on in the drawing class this morning the teacher brought out some pictures the group had been working with the day before. They were medical diagrams of intestines. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t feel good. I had a bad taste in my mouth.
In the break, when everyone else grabbed coffee and biscuits and talked about what they’d been doing, I sat down and did the drawing on the right. It was big and it was fast. I didn’t like looking at it.
The picture didn’t look right. It wasn’t how I remembered it happening. For a start, the only thing that had screamed had been the cable right before it broke. Second, when I think about it, I wasn’t even looking when he fell. I remember him being all crumpled up in the stupid yellow coveralls they gave us, the angles being wrong but the blood all dark and mixed up in the other wet and mess. (more…)
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
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