I’m doing a synopsis-brainstorming session this week with my plotting students (If you’d like access to such fun sessions, join the Plot Blueprint Course! http://bit.ly/plotblueprint). They might be disappointed not to end up with a complete 10-page synopsis (in 2 hours? :), but this isn’t about writing the synopsis but…
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What Harry Potter Can Teach Writers about the End of the Character Journey By Alicia Rasley Want to create an intense experience for the reader? Start at the end! Craft the emotionally right end of the character journey. Consider this: If your readers have gotten all this way to…
Anyone plunging into NaNoWrimo next month? That’s “National Novel Writing Month”- the international challenge to write the first draft of a book or story in November. I’m going to do something kind of impulsive, and I’m inviting you to join in. Better yet, it’s free and comes with a reward worth…
The wonderful Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is finally in the public domain! That means I can quote it right here with no copyright infringement. I’ve been waiting for years and years— well, since I was 10 years old and my class at St. Aidan’s…
by Alicia Rasley Now it’s understandable that many students are confused about what is and isn’t plagiarism! After all, we tell students not to rely on their own knowledge but to seek out information from other sources. We tell them to use quotes from other authors too. And then we…
This will start out boring for non-punctuation-lovers, but then I’ll quote Robert Frost, which is always a great benefit to society. So slog through the boring part to get to the poetry and my explanation of how Frost shows how important it is to “know the rules, then break them.”…
Who Cares? Character Values and Conflict Who cares? Well, our characters do. These sometimes larger-than-life types care passionately about people and places and objects and concepts and experiences. If you can figure out what your characters care about, you can use these values to discover more about them, to…
Who Cares? Character Values and Conflict Who cares? Well, our characters do. These sometimes larger-than-life types care passionately about people and places and objects and concepts and experiences. If you can figure out what your characters care about, you can use these values to discover more about them, to…
I think Stephen King is the Dickens of our age! That is, his ability to create powerful stories with universal themes makes him someone whose stories will last long past our time. And he’s a writer’s writer– he is obsessed with the process of writing and the power of story,…
We’ve all done it– quoted something we heard somewhere attributed to someone…. http://quoteinvestigator.com/