Momentum, Mystery and Morality
Plot Power comes in many forms. Emotion, character qualities, the fact that your story is in a genre - I’m not going to deny that these...
Recognition
I’ve explained elsewhere that deep attraction comes when you give a reader the feeling of being drawn into an emptiness or gap or loss or...
What Makes An Attractive Plotline?
As an editor, I meet a lot of GOOD writers out there who are really frustrated. They are sick of plots that go nowhere. They're annoyed...
The Iceberg of Fiction
As a child, I grew up in the ancient kingdom of Elmet on the edge of the Peak District in South Yorkshire, where I walked in the green...
An Outline of Fiction
In the world as it appears, there is an almost infinite pool of attention swirling around in the minds of potential readers, being drawn...
What Powers a Protagonist?
When working on a protagonist, you are building a construct, not a person. By all means, assemble whole filing cabinets full of imagined...
The Moment of Sacrifice
A protagonist and an antagonist can be basically the same figure, walking down different roads. A protagonist starts with a loss which...
The Foundations of Story-Telling
90% of writers - those that actually get started on writing - sit down and simply write scene after scene straight from their...
5 Ways of Establishing an Ideal Reader
One good place to start as a writer is in thinking about readers. There's a mental process which you can go through to help you focus on...
Inside the Antagonist
The antagonist in fiction is that character who has adopted a fixed solution to an inner vacuum or emptiness or threat. This fixed...