There is more to storytelling than just spilling your imagination onto the page. What is the three-act structure? How does structure compartmentalise a story? What is a structural map? There’s plotting and subplotting. And characters. What makes for an interesting character? What is an arc? What do readers expect from a character? What is pacing? … Continued
When you read, you hear the narrative in your head. The voice you hear won’t be the idealised version of your own – you know the one you hear in your head when you’re rehearsing what you’re going to say to somebody? Like if you’re preparing for an argument with an internet provider, or a … Continued
Authors often comes to us, asking what means they could employ to improve their manuscript. There’s editing, which would look at the manuscript in terms of structure or copy (or a combination of both). There are also workshops, although they’re designed more to improve the writer’s skills, which they will then apply to their manuscript. … Continued
There is no formula for writing a book that works for everybody, although there are templates that tell you that a book should be X chapters, include a bonus chapter, contain these and those appendices, and each chapter should contain roughly 2,500 words, accumulating to a total of roughly forty to fifty thousand words. What … Continued
Tonight, we’re off to a
In the last blog, we looked at breaking down content so that whatever message the content as a whole was intended to deliver – be that the plot of a novel, the biography of a subject, the information of a topic, or the guide of a self-help book – it did so logically, causally, and … Continued
Lots of writers look for a formula in writing, e.g. a novel should be 80,000 words each chapter should be 2,000 words 80,000/2,000 = 40 chapters. And then they’ll try write to that template. The problem is that in any given chapter, you might wrap up what needs to be said in 700 words. What … Continued
At some point, you’re going to have to revise your writing. If you think you don’t, that you’ve produced something flawless, well, you have work to do on your attitude before you even get to your writing. You will need to revise. It’s inevitable. A big concern is you know your work too well. You … Continued
