A story that goes nowhere is pretty dull. Even simple fairy tales like The Three Little Pigs or Little Red Ridinghood move forward in a predictable, understandable way. Complex stories follow this same progression, with Shakespearean plays serving as a good example. This narrative structure is critical to understanding how and why stories work, and how to improve your own storytelling skills. This post goes into detail about narrative structure and conflict, and how the two work together to keep a reader’s attention.
Writing
Posts related to the process of writing.
How to Dig Yourself Out of a Hole
In my last post about writing, I talked about how I started the draft of my novel, how I thought I knew what I was doing, and how I found out I was completely wrong. In this post, I’ll talk about how I started fixing the problems I’d created for myself and how I moved forward through the editing process.
How Not to Write a Novel
I will admit that when I started working on my first novel, I really had no idea what I was getting into. I’d written plenty of novella length pieces before, generally between 25-30k words, and I naively assumed that my process for writing those would work for writing a longer form piece. Boy, was I wrong.