Rethinking Your Story: What’s Your Favorite “Vicarious” Ride?
The Fourth in a Series on What Elevates a Story to Greatness Wanted: Your Input Some of you — many of you — are asking for examples of vicarious storytelling, and how this differentiates from, well, less than vicarious storytelling. The mystery genre is a great example of storytelling that doesn’t particularly rely on the […]
Rethinking Your Story: Take the Reader for the Ride of Their Life
The Third in a Series on What Elevates a Story to Greatness If sports analogies aren’t your cup of tea, then allow me to apologize in advance. But today’s case is a great example of how thinking differently can make the difference between a bench player and a superstar. Which is also true in writing. I’m going […]
Rethinking Your Story: The Power of “Arena”
The Second in a Series on What Elevates a Story to Greatness In the last post I suggested that the great ones — in writing and in any other avocation — think differently than the rest of us. With writers, this doesn’t necessarily translate to more compelling prose. Writing voice isn’t as much a function of […]
Empowering Ways to “Think” About Your Story
The First in a Series on What Elevates a Story to Greatness In virtually every field of endeavor you can name, scrutiny shows us that the great ones think differently than the rest of us. They may outperform us, too, but rest assured, before that happened they thought differently. Almost without exception. This notion struck […]
Story Structure vs. Music Theory — a guest post by Steve Steuart
The following is a guest article by writer and musician Steve Steuart. I was a musician, and then I was a writer. Actually, both, once music gets in your blood it’s there for good. As I began an in-depth study of storytelling, both here on Storyfix and elsewhere (including Larry’s ebooks), I quickly noticed something. Wasn’t […]
We’re Back! New Post: Chapters, Scenes and Parts… Oh My!
Wherein we address the question: how long should my chapters be? We’ve all been there. It’s late, the eyelids are getting heavy, you’re laying there reading and the lights are begging to go out. But the book is good, it has nothing at all do with your jonesing need to fall asleep. Like, right now. […]
Reprise: And The Nominee For Best Director in a Novel Is…
In honor of last night’s Oscars, and because I continue to sweat over the impending due-date for my Six Core Competencies manuscript (the first half), here’s a reprise of an early Storyfix post that got a lot of reader feedback. Back soon. Say what? Best director in a novel? Last night I was watching some […]
Part 2: Why It Took Me 28 Years to Write My “Latest” Novel
Click HERE to read Part 1 of this article, wherein I explain why writing this novel scared the hell out of me. Maybe even literally. The Story Behind Whisper of the Seventh Thunder Consider this for a moment. If you don’t believe any of it, then big deal, you keep writing. But I did believe, […]
Why It Took Me 28 Years to Write My “Latest” Novel
The Story Behind Whisper of the Seventh Thunder Part 1 of 2. People ask me all the time where I get my ideas. I have two answers. One is for writers, and I usually give it at my writing workshops in context to seizing a teachable moment. The other is less precise, and much longer. […]
I suck. Let me make it up to you.
Okay, maybe I don’t exactly suck. At least I hope not. But I am feeling guilty. I’m cramming on a deadline for the publisher of my forthcoming Six Core Competencies book, and because of that I’m force-feeding you some early Storyfix posts that I’m assuming the bulk of new subscribers haven’t seen. One of them […]