We worry about contrivance and coincidence in our stories. For instance, in my novel, Why Ought I to Die?, the ending relies in large part on the main character being at a specific place at a specific time1, a place
We’ve gone over the ways you can lie in Part One, but that’s only half the battle. In fiction, a bad lie kills your story; a good lie (almost always) requires you to tell the truth eventually, finds its virtue
The first rule of lying to your reader: Don’t lie. The second rule? Lie to them all you like, as long as you’re telling the truth. Plot twists, that fabled love of many an over-enthusiastic author, rely upon such lies.
In The Three Uses of the Knife1, pages 73-75, David Mamet explains how, in his view, people reframe every time-sequence they find into a story, integrating each new fact of it by adjusting the story’s whole to fit: he avers
Many of us have heard this piece of writing advice: “If you give Frodo a lightsaber, you have to give Sauron the Death Star.” On the surface, this directive sounds plausible. We want to maintain tension, and obviously if you
Introduction World War One, from its own perspective, is an odd period of time, full of dramatic irony, tragedy, and dark humor. The three novels I’ll be briefly discussing today are classics of the era and justly so; I have
Pacing- story pacing, not reiterative walking- is a tricky beast. The problem, fundamentally, is that you, the author, have to determine not only how fast the story should move but how fast it does move. The first, honestly, is not
The list of ways to go wrong with a story has been added to and debated endlessly for century upon century upon century. The debate on plot alone is a few libraries of its own, honestly, and I don’t pretend
I have an affection for fantasy, born from The Lord of the Rings and fostered through the years, and an affection for historical fiction, born from many thousands of pages (hundreds of books, likely) in my youth. I’m not much
Ever since metaphorical pen was first set to metaphorical paper, a debate has raged: which is better, the happy ending or the sad one? The sides are many and varied, each side disagreeing with itself about why it’s right and