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…)
National Novel Writing Month is an annual creative project on the internet, where crazy people try to write a novel (or 50,000 words of a novel) in a month. Alongside the main even in November, there is Camp NaNoWriMo twice annually (April and July this year), which allows for more flexible targets. It’s a great experience, and a powerful cure for writer’s block. Last April I was a winner, and in this article I share my top 10 tips for writing a novel in a month with NaNoWriMo. (more…)
I’ve had the toolkit out. The bonnet is up. I’m up to my elbows in my novel draft, but this time I’m going to find out what’s making that funny squeaking noise and I’m going to fix it. The solution: repairing the balance between plot and character. This article is about the process I’ve gone through to bring life back to my characters and through them into my plot. (more…)
The new Star Wars trailer came out recently, official teaser #2, and it contains a rather brilliant example of the effective use of 2nd Person Point of View (PoV) I was talking about in an article a few weeks ago.* Check out the trailer below and you’ll see what I mean.
When I was 19 I wrote a novel called “A Peculiar Betrayal.” I feverishly typed it out between watches on ship, scribbled its chapters in notepads on buses and trains; I filled it with all the angst and spelling mistakes I could muster. Of the handful of literary agents I dared sent it to, two were kind enough to send back personal notes[i] alongside their standard rejection letters. Both were surprisingly encouraging, but both said the same thing: show, don’t tell. This article is my attempt, almost twenty years later, to understand what that means. (more…)
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