In recent months, I have done far more reading than writing, much to the detriment of progress on my latest novel. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed catching up on the works of other Sci-Fi writers from whom I can learn a lot, and I have enjoyed re-reading some of the technical screenwriting material on the subject …
Editing — my tools and techniques
In the first of my previous blogs on editing, I looked at the lessons that I had learnt a long time ago from the world of business book publishing. In the second blog I looked at what I had to learn more recently to adapt to publishing fiction. In this blog I want to look …
Editing — How fiction differs from other forms of writing
In the previous blog I discussed some of the important lessons I learnt from editors in the field of business publications many years ago. In this blog I want to look at how I needed to adapt to the world of fiction. As we shall see, it's not just about spellchecking and grammar checking. Fiction …
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Editing – early lessons learnt from professional editors
In this blog I want to discuss editing, why it is so important, and when to do it. I also want to draw upon some of my early experiences with professional editors and communication in the business world. A simple definition of editing from Google is as follows: Editing is a stage of the writing …
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Story Shapes and Emotional Arcs
Kurt Vonnegut was the author famous for his novels including Slaugherhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. But he was also famous for his for his concept of story shapes, which was the subject of his rejected Master's Thesis in Anthropology. He called his story shapes his prettiest contribution to culture. In simple terms, Vonnegut believed the shape …
Amazon eBook offers
Those of you that regularly follow my blog will realise most of my blog content is dedicated to the art of storytelling and my own learning adventures into the realms of story development. Occasionally I use this blog to bring news about my own books, and on this occasion I am unashamingly promoting two of …
Conflict, Tension and Audience Participation
Novel writers can learn a lot about story development from the screenwriting industry. In my previous blog, I dealt with how screenwriters use Story, Plot, Arc and Theme to develop a story. This month I want to look at how screenwriters use Conflict, Tension and Audience Participation to grip an audience. The essential elements of …
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Story, Plot, Arc and Theme — how they work together
Any new writer might well be confused by some of the terms used in writing such as story, plot, arc and theme. Aren't they interchangeable terms? It's easy to see why the terms might be confused. The first person to distinguish story from plot was E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster wrote …
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Character Arc
As a writer, if you want to study story telling there is no better source than world of screenwriting where Hollywood has turned the art of story telling into a science. Of course, writing a novel and writing a screenplay are very different mediums: movies are visual and novels are written. But they both share …
The writing process
It is almost eight years since I started writing novels, and I've learned an awful lot in that time. It hasn't been easy. I had a story I wanted to write and I wanted to start writing it as soon as possible. But I soon found out that you need to make some key decisions before …
JMJ Williamson 