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`Category` Writing

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Treated as a craft, patterns to follow and patterns to avoid

Articles with Category Writing (20…)

Characters in Fiction
Creating a book
Dialogue in fiction
Fan Theories
Henry Porter
How to write like P.G.Wodehouse
Joke Genious
L-Space
Making Prose Poetic
Missing Mothers
Story Layers
The 32 People You Meet In Heaven, Hell and Everywhere Else
The Action Hero Theory
The enchanted loom
The Magic of the Blues Brothers
The Pride of the Woosters
Time Travel Models
What is 'a remembrance of things past' about? What is the plot?
Writing a Mystery Novel
Writing Rules

Characters in Fiction

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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…

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Creating a book

writing self publishing

This article deals with self-publishing a book, in a variety of forms. It covers writing, editing, proofreading, and has technical points on preparing a manuscript. Writing itself Before you can publish it you have to write it. There are two ways you can do this: write it your…

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Dialogue in fiction

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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 …

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Fan Theories

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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…

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Henry Porter

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The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn't Henry Porter — Bob Dylan and Sam Sheppard, Brownsville Girl LOAD FACT: "Henry Porter" was not the “real name” of writer “O. Henry” Understood. LOAD FACT: "William Sydney Porter" was not the "real name"…

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How to write like P.G.Wodehouse

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There are many rules one must follow if one wishes to write like P.G.Wodehouse. The first of these is: Never write: Pop Bassett was surprised, Aunt Dahlia was resolved, and Constable Oates appeared vexed. ...when, to save paper, ink, and time you can simply write: Pop Basset…

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Joke Genious

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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 …

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L-Space

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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…

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Making Prose Poetic

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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…

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Missing Mothers

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A moment of silence for all of the fictional mothers that had to die in the name of tragic back story and character development. — @ *Snape* on Mother's Day 2015 This is something my kids have noticed. It seems like every movie we show them: the mother is dead, sick or missing. …

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Story Layers

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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…

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The 32 People You Meet In Heaven, Hell and Everywhere Else

stub writing fiction psychology

Consider the The Big Five Personality Traits, i.e. - Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) - Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless) - Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) - Agreeableness (friendly/compassion…

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The Action Hero Theory

stub writing fiction

There are two kinds of male action heroes -- the tough guy and the pretty boy. The key to the tough guy is not what he does to other people but what other people do to him. In particular: he can take a punch. The defining feature of action hero stories is that the hero *does* …

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The enchanted loom

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Every thread of history reveals another layer of the tapestry of our existence The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thit…

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The Magic of the Blues Brothers

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The Blues Brothers, apart from being a masterpiece, is a work of Magical Realism. It combines gritty urban cinematography, with an unreal sense of wonder. The opening scenes work to make this an utterly real setting. The meticulous locking and unlocking of prison gates. The ted…

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The Pride of the Woosters

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A Character Study of Bertram Wooster. P.G. Wodehouse has created numerous characters with a range of attributes - and I ought to catalog as many as I can in this short life allotted to me. The tragedy of someone like Wodehouse is that his output was so prolific that in a normal…

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Time Travel Models

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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. …

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What is 'a remembrance of things past' about? What is the plot?

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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…

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Writing a Mystery Novel

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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…

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Writing Rules

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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…

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