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 […]
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 […]
Literacy = Reading + Writing
I’ve had the privilege of working with scholars and authors from all over the world, and the contrasts (and unexpected similarities) in their approaches to reading and writing are striking. One is not necessarily better or worse than another, but they sometimes run opposite to one another, and that can get an international scholar into […]