Building a believable storyworld is crucial when writing fantasy, SF, paranormal, magical realism, or any other sort of speculative fiction. Naturally, your storyworld will be influenced by the worlds of your favorite authors and filmmakers and storytellers in other media, but you want to avoid mimicking them so closely that your work sounds like fanfic. But how […]
Archives for September 2018
Remain Calm: the update (CreateSpace is digested at last by KDP)
If all your books are published on the CreateSpace platform (which is dissolving very soon), we have good news, old news, and …well, the potential bad news still lurks in the future. First some bottom-line good news for nearly all of you:
Micro-level story structure: The Mysterious MRU
Story Structure, Part 2: the MRU Remember that mid-level scene-by-scene story structure works best with a rhythm of Goal, Conflict, Disaster, Reaction, Dilemma, Decision. You can divide this rhythm into Scenes and Sequels, as Dwight Swain does, or you can divide them into pairs (Goal/Conflict, Disaster/Reaction, Dilemma/Decision), or you can consider them one long unified […]
Mid-level story structure: Scenes and Sequels
Many of my posts are inspired by questions from my clients, or from SLAKE discussions, or questions from Quora (for which I am a Top Writer in certain categories). This one came from authors and writers asking great questions at a SLAKE meeting. It is actually a two-part answer, and it won’t be an exhaustive […]