wiki.secretGeekCategories writing + grimoire
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11 Articles that combine these categories:
Characters in Fiction
Writing a book and struggling to make either a good book or powerful characters? I have original and useful ideas. Possibly wrong, but definitely helpful. What are characters for? In the book "How to Write a Damn Good Novel", James Frey says: Characters are to a novelist what…
Dialogue in fiction
Dialogue is a conversation between two people. Jill: How are you Jack? Jack: I'm good, Jill and you? Jill: Not good Jack. Not good at all. Dialogue in fiction should be *indirect.* Dialogue often has to do two or three things at once. - It may have to reveal facts. (This is …
Fan Theories
There's a long long tradition, dating back at least five years, of reimagining a movie to have a different premise, generally in which one or all characters are dead, imaginary, or linked in an unexpected way, possibly involving time-travel. "This amazing pixar fan theory" -- Pi…
Joke Genious
The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. —Famous Smart Alec, Samuel Clemens Explaining a joke can only ever make it funnier Analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog, in the end they both die. —Woody Allen I used to believe that jokes stopped being funny when …
L-Space
Libraries exist in a transdimensional manifold - take a wrong turn in the stacks and you may go from library A to library B - seamlessly crossing both space and time - turn down another corridor and you may wind up in 2B-space - a coextensive manifold that interweaves connects an…
Making Prose Poetic
Writing can sing. Writing can soar. How do writers elevate their craft to carry you along with their words? I've never known, until I read this: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen t…
Story Layers
I've worked out a proper grand unified theory of story telling, and it's much simpler than all the old theories. The Search for the Grand Unified Theory of Story Telling Some people analyze stories and say things like: There's a plot, and there's a story. The plot is just what…
Time Travel Models
There are various ways that time-travel is described in stories and in physics. - Some of these differ in how paradoxes are (or are not) resolved. - Some differ in the physical limitations they impose.1 There are various meta-studies and attempted catalogs of the entire field. …
What is 'a remembrance of things past' about? What is the plot?
ah -- it takes me back the smell of this biscuit. this is how the book begins -- and right now -- the thought of the opening of 'a remembrance of things past' or 'in search of lost time' -- invokes in me a stirring of a strange memory of having recently seen an episode of "the…
Writing a Mystery Novel
It is hard to find practical guides to doing anything magical. Magicians don't like to reveal where to place the hinges or what to feed your pet dove. So I like it when an article gives away the secrets, like this one: Charles Finch: "Writing Great Mystery Plots" Here's the kern…
Writing Rules
writing grimoire o henry vonnegut pixar orwell elmore leonard hemingway henry miller bradbury stephen king zadie smith gaiman margaret atwood
Write what you like; there is no other rule. — O. Henry Rules for writers, from writers. One of the first blog posts I wrote on secretGeek was "How to write a novel". This was an entirely tongue in cheek article with advice on what *not* to do. A lot of people read it, and it w…