Having covered story beginnings and middles in previous blogs, it seems only natural to cover story endings. Whether a story ending is right or not can ultimately only be judged by the reader. If the ending is not consistent with the direction the story is taking the reader, they may well feel disappointed and let …
Does your middle sag?
I don’t mean your waist line that might be suffering from that late night snack attack. I mean that author’s graveyard – the middle of your story when enthusiasm wains and your characters wonder what they’re doing, and you wonder why you ever started the story. Unless you’re one of the literary giants like Stephen …
What is science fiction?
Recently, we (the family) were hunting through our DvD/Blu-ray movie collection for one of my favourite sci movies of all time: Blade Runner. Eventually, after going through our collection several times, we found it. But I knew after all the effort of searching that it was time to put our collection into some kind of …
The End of Act 1
Most people have at least heard of the three act structure. It originated from the stage, but can also be used by writers and screenwriters to analyse their stories. Of course, unlike a play, a book or movie is not broken down into discrete units, and so the act structure is invisible from the reader’s/audience’s …
Outline and outliners
How do you measure the progress you’re making on writing a book? Do you think in terms of the word-count you’ve written or the number of scenes you’ve completed? The answer possibly lies in the type of writer you are. If you’re an organic writer (or ‘pantser’) that believes that any form of outlining is …
Getting off to a good start
So you’ve developed your story idea, done some outlining or story planning and now you’re ready to start writing your novel. You stare at the screen and the curser blinks back at you. You think it’s mocking you. You know that first sentence has to be brilliant prose; it has to capture the reader’s imagination …
The Style Rules of Writing Fiction
After spending so much of my business career writing reports, books and letters in a plain style of English, writing fiction for the first time was quite a challenge for me. If you’re contemplating writing your own novel for the first time, you might be struggling with the same kind of issues. Below I’ve set …
First or third, what’s your point of view?
Writers tend to read a lot, and recently I ’ve been reading more than I’ve been writing. Apart from the joy of reading a good novel, it’s also an opportunity to study the styles of successful authors outside my genre, and learn from them. One of the books I finished recently is Stephenie Meyer’s Host. …
What a novelist can learn from the movies
It’s almost eight months since I published my first novel and I’ve only just written the opening scene of my second novel. It might seem a long time in planning, but I haven’t been working on it full time and I wanted to make sure that I had the right story and I understood my …
Authors’ software
As a newbie author, I’m always on the lookout for new software that might make the task of writing easier. I have always wondered if there was that killer application lurking out there that would make life simpler, if only I could just find it. Other newbie authors might be thinking the same way. Therefore …
JMJ Williamson 