A story is about a character or characters who desperately wants something and pursues a goal through a series of actions and outcomes that escalate to the climax of the story, and the eventual resolution of the story. In simple terms -- this chain of cause and effect events is the 'plot' of a story. …
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Alien Hothouse
Just to let you know that Alien Hothouse by JMJ Williamson is on a Kindle countdown offer for the period 29 November to 3 December on Amazon.com for $0.99 (normally $2.99). It is also available on Amazon.co.uk £0.99. Her best friend and neighbours are aliens. Now they want to go home, and she will risk everything to …
Writing Character
Many of the articles on writing fiction differentiate between character-driven stories and plot-driven stories. I find the distinction is a bit of a misnomer as all stories are really character-driven. For example, James Bond stories may well be action-filled but without Bond committed to his goal/mission there would be no story at all. What I …
Simple story patterns
In my blog over the years, I have written a lot about story structure. Story structure is all about the foundations of a story. From childhood we are introduced to stories and quickly understand their patterns. Once-upon-a-time… and they all lived happily every after. Remember this one: Jack takes his family cow to sell, but …
The writer’s toolbox
In this blog I want to look at Scrivener -- a software tool that changed my life as a writer, and which today I couldn't do without. What does a novelist or writer need in order to write? Comparatively little. Remember Shakespeare only needed a quill, ink and paper. And he did quite well with …
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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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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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 