The Power of Symbolism: A Guest Post by Nann Dunne

February 15, 2012

by Nann Dunne Recently, I watched an episode of CSI:NY that had a scene that impressed me enough to stick in my mind. In the scene setup, the character Jo, a policewoman played by Sela Ward, accompanies a female witness home. Shortly after the woman goes into her bedroom to get some clothes, Jo calls [...]

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The Three Layers of Story Engineering, Architecture, and Art

February 8, 2012

Everything can be broken down.  Plant and animal.  Fact and fallacy.  Art and science.  Sliced, diced, eviscerated, deconstructed, analyzed, charted, graphed, melted, spectra-analyzed and debated.  Sometimes this yields precision, other times a vague generality. Either way, from this process of breakdown comes illumination.  Visibility.  Clarity of purpose, design and effectiveness. And then… often only then… [...]

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Produce… X 3

February 6, 2012

Please click HERE to see an interview/discussion I had with Authornomics.com, who ask some great questions about story architecture, process and why it works. Then come on back to read another piece from regular Storyfix contributor Art Holcomb.   Produce, Produce, Produce a guest post by Art Holcomb “Two pieces of paper hang above my [...]

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So What’s Your Story(ies)?

February 2, 2012

Usually, when you let it slip that you’re a writer, the response is, “what do you write?”  As if you’d just said the most unexpected thing possible. Everybody’s a writer, it seems (that comes out later), but hardly anyone admits it. And when you say “novels” or “screenplays,” one of two things is likely to [...]

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Game Changer: Create An Inner Dialogue Within your Hero, and Your Villain

January 28, 2012

Things we’ve talked about before: -         your hero’s inner demon, something that likely is explained by backstory and is an obstacle to what your hero seeks to accomplish in your story.  The exposure (to the reader) of this inner demon reveals a second dimension of character depth beneath the exterior one dimensional façade seen by [...]

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What Writers Are Saying About… This Stuff

January 26, 2012

I’ve dropped nearly 500 posts on Storyfix.  About 425 remain in the archives, the others having migrated to various ebooks.  Sometimes, when that little voice tells me it’s time to get something new up, I feel like I’ve circled the wagons and don’t have something fresh or worthy enough to add. And sometimes that’s when the [...]

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Further Perspective on Author Branding — You Are Forced To Choose Who You Are

January 23, 2012

And of course, to not choose is, in fact, a choice.    One with consequences that are just as defining for your career as a writer.   This is a follow up to my most recent post, entitled “We read (INSERT YOUR NAME HERE) because…”   Several who commented online, and a few who contacted [...]

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We read (INSERT YOUR NAME HERE) because…

January 21, 2012

We write our stories for different reasons.  If one of them is to make a career of it – not simply to publish, but to last – you need to be able to finish that sentence for your readers with clarity and purpose. You need to be playing the long game. When you look at the regular names [...]

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“Scheherazade” — A Guest Post from Art Holcomb

January 17, 2012

by Art Holcomb Two pieces of paper hang above my desk.   One is a quote (more about that next time) and the other is the picture below. It is from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. As the tale goes, the Persian King Shahryar would marry a new virgin each night only to slay them [...]

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Storyfix: A Facelift, a New Approach, a Second Founding

January 14, 2012

Change is good.  Feels like a root canal sometimes, but in the end, when the swelling goes down and you look in the mirror, that tuned up smile has an extra twinkle in it. If you’re on the site reading this, then you’ve probably noticed the changes.  A little more than subtle, yet not quite a [...]

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