Good to Great: Nail a Better Concept To Empower Your Story
Pop quiz: what is the CONCEPT of your story? I ask this of all of my story coaching clients, right at the top. The answers are frustratingly all over the map. And yet, I believe it is one of the most important things a writer needs to understand about their story. The problem with both […]
“Side Effects” – a Preview of the Forthcoming Deconstruction
Two quickie personal announcements (the downside of having a not-in-service newsletter, which I’m working on resurrecting): Check out the March/April issue of Writers Digest Magazine. Above the cover banner is the header: “The Plot Thickens: A Step-by-Step Guide to Subplots.” Once inside you’ll find three articles on this topic, one of which is by yours […]
Deconstructing “Side Effects” — A Writer’s Movie…
… even for a novelist. Especially if the writer is a novelist. Your assignment, should you decided to accept it, is to get your fanny to the multi-plex and invest nine bucks in your writing career… by seeing this movie. “Side Effects” was released this weekend (Feb. 9) to glowing reviews, the focus of […]
A Call for Storyfix Post Topics
Any questions? There’s a lot to this fiction writing stuff. I try to cover it, to emphasize what I think are the sweet spots of the craft of storytelling. Even so, certain questions keep coming up. So I’m asking YOU… what would you like to see covered here in 2013? Anything, the […]
The Football of Story — by Art Holcomb
I know I can’t be the first person to make this connection. As I sat in agony and watched my beloved Forty-Niners won one of the most exciting football games I’ve ever seen. My whole eyes were on the game and prediction done by dream 11 prediction. How they predict each goal or for any […]
The Power of a Storytelling Model
(The following is an excerpt — it’s Chapter 1 — from “Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing” – Writers Digest Books, 2011) by Larry Brooks You can go your whole career as a writer without someone asking you to define the essence of story. What it means. What it is. What […]
A Pep Talk
This little gem is going viral, and quickly. You’ll see why. Writers need pep talks as much as any demographic niche out there, at least in terms of dreams and careers and dealing with rejection. There are worse things to be, darker situations, certainly… but as one writer to another… … here’s a pep talk […]
Beware the Under-Cooked Story Concept
“I see this a lot.” I’m a little wary of opening with that, but I have to confess, it’s the first thing that keeps popping into my head when I want to address – again – the recurring and story-killing issue of writers using an undercooked “concept” as their opening point of reference for their […]
How to Engage Your Reader — A Guest Post by Matthew Turner
There was – apparently – a time when a writer merely wrote, sat back, and let the good times roll. That time is no more, at least not for 99% of us. These days writers are marketers, publishers, formatters, designers, and most importantly… engagers. To stand out from the crowd you need to communicate with […]
The Trifecta of Storytelling Power
Beyond Craft… Embracing Greatness Oh what a tangled, slippery-sloped, viper-infested, self-sabotaging path we fiction writers tread. What seems so simple — because we read excellent stories all the time, and they really do seem, well, if not simple, then at least clear and clean, and therefore not beyond our means — turns out to be […]