THE WRITER’S CRAFT explores various principles, techniques, and guidelines to help authors of all genres improve writing and storytelling craft.

Five Great Storytelling Lessons from Harry Potter Principle One: Plant the seeds early, but plant them loosely and let them grow

This year- and possibly for years to come – everyone will be talking about The Boy Who Lived and his son, Albus, the main protagonist of the new 2016 addition to the Harry Potter series. In anticipation of the (unexpected) new addition, Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, I decided to re-read the entire series, […]

By |2024-01-06T22:41:13+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on Five Great Storytelling Lessons from Harry Potter Principle One: Plant the seeds early, but plant them loosely and let them grow

A History of the Great Divide: Literature vs. Genre Fiction Breathing life into a post-modern Prometheus

literary coffeeI was once involved in a near knockdown drag-out fight that began with my assertion that John Irving’s The World According to Garp was a great piece of “literature.” The wine-swilling MFA fiction writer seated across from me at the bar took […]

By |2024-01-06T22:47:23+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on A History of the Great Divide: Literature vs. Genre Fiction Breathing life into a post-modern Prometheus

Writing with Voice Editor Shannon Roberts on building your authorial voice in unexpected ways

[by Shannon Roberts]

Confession: When I first started writing, I copied.

Not ideas—not consciously anyway—but voice

Initially I modeled my work after one of my (at the time) favorite bloggers and web-comic writers, Jerry Holkins. I started to fold in some Terry Pratchett and I sampled from […]

By |2024-01-06T21:48:36+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on Writing with Voice Editor Shannon Roberts on building your authorial voice in unexpected ways

Authentic Voice Elements of Craft: One editor’s take on an author’s technique

 

Fiction readers are very demanding creatures.

They want their made-up stories to be as close to truth as possible—sort of like vegetarian meat. If they have to pick between two gritty detective novels, one by an ex-cop and the other by an MFA who has always lived in the nice part of town, you know which […]

By |2024-01-06T22:41:30+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on Authentic Voice Elements of Craft: One editor’s take on an author’s technique

Characters: Making Them Real Tips on making your characters convincing and memorable from editor Renni Browne

Most fiction writers begin a novel or short story by coming up with characters firmly in mind and then building a story around them—or by coming up with a plot and then building characters to play the various roles it requires. It’s not really that simple, of course: an unruly character may at some point dictate a […]

By |2024-01-06T21:52:55+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on Characters: Making Them Real Tips on making your characters convincing and memorable from editor Renni Browne

Yul Brynner’s Black Hat Considering good vs. evil in fantasy fiction

Bad guys and black hats are, in the classic American Western film, almost synonymous.

Even if you haven’t seen many Westerns, you’ve probably absorbed this knowledge via cultural osmosis—I certainly had.

Fortunately, the first Western I was privileged to watch was The Magnificent Seven (if a cowboy movie based on […]

By |2024-01-06T21:53:15+00:00|The Writer’s Craft|Comments Off on Yul Brynner’s Black Hat Considering good vs. evil in fantasy fiction
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