Craft of Writing

Writing Lessons (3): Conflict, the Essential Ingredient!

The last writing lessons focused on reader expectations (genre conventions) and the four basic narrative elements (plot, character, setting, and point of view). Several popular books about making your novel or screenplay a commercial success (including those by Robert McKee, Scott Meredith, Steven Pressfield, Shawn Coyne, and many others) like to focus on plot–arguing that readers …

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How Robert Redford Influenced Wolf Code (And Jim and Jamie Dutcher Too)

So where did you get the idea for your book? Authors hear this question frequently. It is a good conversation starter because it asks the writer to punctuate the highlights in the long journey to bring the story to the readers. Though some novelists can crank out books in several weeks, most of us spend months …

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How Martin Luther King Saved Uhura: The ‘Escapist’ Power of Stories

I recently watched the documentary Trek Nation and learned Nichelle Nichols considered leaving Star Trek after the first season. During this pivotal time, she met Martin Luther King, Jr. and learned he and his wife numbered Star Trek among the very few shows they let their children watch. When he learned she was planning to leave the show, …

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How To Find the Perfect Writing App: An Idiosyncratic Quest from Typewriter to Scrivener

Now that I’m in the production stage with Wolf Code, I finally took a moment to re-evaluate my “workflow,” as a number of writers call the process by which we fashion words into stories. I’m not talking about the creative side to writing, but the physical side. Thirty plus years ago, a writer would answer this …

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Writing Is Immersion!

We are all babies in the water…. As I’ve been wrestling with myself to get words in my computer to finish my novel, and as I’ve been reading comments from fellow writers on Twitter, I’ve been reflecting on this game of fiction writing. I’ve noted how other writers are having difficulty “focusing” and still others …

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Anyone Can Write!

Pixar’s animated movie Ratatouille tosses around the slogan, “Anyone can cook!” The story dramatically plays with this slogan, putting a rat inside one of the most prestigious restaurants in Paris. For our quick reflection, I would like to modify the slogan so that it says, “Anyone can write!” Certainly many people feel that way. If we …

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