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Why do you do it?

March 14, 2022 by Nic Nelson Leave a Comment

There are only two fundamental reasons for writing anything. It’s either therapy or impact. If you are writing for impact, you are writing primarily for others. If you are writing for therapy, you are writing primarily for yourself. Anything written specifically for impact must focus on, and can only be judged by, its intended audience and the impact […]

Filed Under: Blog, Writing Tagged With: Creativity, fiction writing, purpose

It takes a lot to make me angry. This did…

September 9, 2021 by Nic Nelson Leave a Comment

I write a lot of answers on Quora (I was a Top Writer in 2018, and have kept contributing since then, but Quora grew bigger and bigger and I became a smaller and smaller fish in comparison). I like answering questions that others find exasperating, trying to do justice to the curiosity behind the “dumb” […]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: academic writing, fiction writing, writers as humans

Micro-level story structure: The Mysterious MRU

September 10, 2018 by Nic Nelson 1 Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: fiction writing, story, story structure