by Jan Bear | Apr 14, 2008 | Uncategorized
I’ve been a fan of Christopher Vogler since, I don’t know, the ’90s, maybe. The second edition of his classic storytelling handbook, The Writers Journey, has been on my bookshelf for a long time. I had been thinking it was probably time to update,...
by Jan Bear | Apr 4, 2008 | Uncategorized
I don’t think I’m the only novice novelist who has trouble coming up with where the character is at the beginning of the story and what she wants before she has the piano dropped on her head at the end of the first act.My characters have been criticized...
by Jan Bear | Mar 6, 2008 | Uncategorized
Adding to yesterday’s thoughts on backstory, Cory Doctorow’s podcast novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, uses a different method of revealing backstory.Like Warren, he starts his novel in medias res and goes backward, after setting the hook, to establish a...
by Jan Bear | Mar 5, 2008 | Uncategorized
Something remarkable about All the King’s Men (earlier post on the subject here).Between the Call to Adventure in disk 4, maybe, of 18 (here’s a brief overview of the Hero’s Journey and the stages; The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers is...
by Jan Bear | Feb 27, 2008 | Uncategorized
I think I mentioned before I dropped off the face of the earth that I wanted to think through what makes a good beginning for a novel. And as a case in point, I thought Myke Bartlett’s How to Disappear Completely: The Terrible Business of Salmon and Dusk was...