What do you do when your usual writing techniques and traditions stop working?
First: get rid of the idea that you need the Muse. The Muse is like that friend who always replies that they’re coming to your event and *maybe* shows up at one of them, late and already a little buzzed. If we waited for the Muse every time we sat down to write, nothing would get done. Continue reading “Breaking down the writer’s block”
The Beat Sheet is a trick I picked up in film school. It covers all the major plot elements (“beats”) of a long form story. Now, Snyder was writing about film, which is much more structurally formulaic than prose, but I firmly believe that taking a good, hard look at structure is essential for any novel, especially if you are writing anything other than hoity toity high-brow experimental literary fiction.
So, if you not in that 0.00001% of writers who are writing hoity toity high brow experimental literary fiction, then the beat sheet is worth your time. At the very least, you’ll notice the formulas and structures that so inescapably pervasive that you probably just took them all for granted. Continue reading “Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet for novels”
I keep tiny notebooks of log-lines. These are brief kernels – nay, seeds – of a story. This something I picked up from film: the need to pitch a story in a single phrase. It has been an invaluable trick not just for getting to the heart of an otherwise complicated story, but for brainstorming writing prompts. Continue reading “On keeping a log-line book”
So a while ago I started posting chapters of a genre mash-up, satirical novel online before I panicked and took them down after realizing that they (a) weren’t at the calibre I could achieve, and (b) were not going to be produced as expediently as I hoped.
I’ve since been working on it again.
I decided to shift the tone of the book (first in a series maybe?) when I stepped back and started examining what sort of genre satires and parodies I enjoyed myself. And I realized that I preferred riffs on genre that don’t make fun of the genre in as much as they exemplify it. Continue reading “Triangulating the text”
