I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and it raises questions about genre that have been on my mind for months. So I’m going to focus for a few posts on genre, and the slippery business of labeling fiction. What categories/distinctions make sense? Which seem more of a product of bias against subject matter [...]
Truby and McKee both point to moral dilemmas as the key to successful fiction. McKee points out that our more relativist society makes developing believable moral dilemmas more difficult. When more people believed in absolutes, crafting moral dilemmas in fiction was more straightforward.
Now, it seems, there is the gray morality of everyday life, in which [...]
The storyteller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality–personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization and location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this world–his map [...]
I’m finding Robert McKee’s distinction between character and characterization helpful as I work on my new novel. According to McKee, “Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education [...]
What’s the starting point of a particular story?
Is it the earliest point in chronology? Is it somewhere in the middle of the action? Is it a point beyond the end of the story to be told, a point of perspective from which a narrator can relate something that once happened? And how do you know?
I [...]
I had lunch with my dad today, and we talked about something that’s been happening in the family. (Garden-variety family stuff, so don’t worry.) When he asked me my side of things, I explained that, since addressing it directly had been badly received, and deflecting hadn’t worked, I’d been avoiding the situation.
Yep, I avoid conflict.
My [...]
Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer’s labor goes into designing story. Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand [...]
Yesterday, I ran across the video above, from Barnes & Noble Studio, on The Daily Beast’s Book Beast page. I’m not a fan of Jodi Picoult, though, to be fair, I’ve only read one of her books, My Sister’s Keeper. I was so disappointed with it, particularly the very deus ex machina feeling of the [...]
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m using a method suggested by Robert McKee in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (HarperEntertainment, 1997) to outline scenes. He recommends outlining a story (novel, screenplay) with one- to three-sentence scene descriptions on index cards before writing anything.
Plan Scenes, But Don’t Write Them (Yet)
McKee suggests [...]
I should know this by now.
Yet, I’ve struggled for years with what, exactly, a scene is.
The dictionary definitions are useful only to a point–the point at which I start trying to craft scenes. That’s when the wheels tend to fall off the bus. But I’ve been using a technique recommended by Robert McKee in his [...]