Novel Narrative

Mocking Marley: The Fall of the Christmas Ghost

Jerome K. Jerome tells us, “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve they start telling each other ghost stories…. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”

Feedback

Giving Effective Feedback to Creative Writers

Your writing partner has asked for some feedback on her novel. Now what?

Activity

Rainy Writing Day Adventure

We stood around like loons scribbling in our notebooks and scrutinizing the piece of art for about 20 minutes.

Activity

Poetry Puzzle

This game gave them a chance to easily revel in the beauty of language, particularly those who were intimidated by creative acts.

Effective Story Telling

Theme Queen

Having a deep connection to a theme is one reason a reader can’t set that perfect book down.

Effective Story Telling

That Pivotal Moment

Thank goodness Bilbo ran after the Dwarves and Lucy explored that wardrobe. Otherwise, we would spend hundreds of pages just watching Bilbo eat and some bored kids waiting out WWII in the countryside.

Character Development

I’m Conflicted

These conflicts inside the heads of your characters are not just there for window dressing. They serve a structural purpose in your storytelling.

Point of View

Whose Story Is It?

The values, goals, and information known by the storyteller influence their narrative.

Genre

Urban Fantasy

Even supernatural beings must cope with problems like lead paint and aging transportation infrastructure.

Genre

Magical Realism

Within the bounds of this genre, I discovered a specialized candy shop of ideas: Glass jars brimming with bright gumballs of fabulism, boiled sweets of the marvelous real, sugar whorls of the baroque, lollipops of Latin literary forms, and caramel creams of German art critique.

Accomplish

Basking in the Glow

I wrote 50k words in a month.

Technical Skills

Brainstorm Forcasted

I used the affinity diagram to help me think through the implications of my protagonist’s socially isolated upbringing.

Accomplish

Hitting the Wall

Since I am new to NaNoWriMo, I didn’t know that the struggle of week two is a well-discussed phenomenon, so I tumbled into the abyss completely unprepared.

Personal Effectiveness

Panning for Gold

Waste is my sworn enemy. There has to be a way to work smarter than this!

Writing

Oh no — NaNoWriMo!

I have officially lost my mind.

Technical Skills

To Infinitives and Beyond

Being mindful with our use of infinitives and gerunds can help us better underscore the mood and feeling of our writing.

Technical Skills

Because I Told You So

Instead of whispering our narrative into the reader’s ear, let’s transport them into the middle of the action and allow them to directly experience the story.

Writing

Digging Out

In Walden, Thoreau talks about the wells of our creativity filling in with silt as we age, and over the last year, I have been digging out.

Writing

With a Little Help from My Friends

We can’t get out of our own heads and the diverse outside perspectives of others crack the eggs we forgot to scramble.

world-building

Real People in a Small World

It’s terrible to imagine so much sorrow crammed into such a small village. The despair must have been inescapable.

Research

Nine White Coffins

The colors of mourning, symbolizing innocence and purity, were an unrelenting white.

Research

Cincinnati Ghost Stories

The cacophony of 30 girls 12 feet down a sewage vault screaming for help....

world-building

Cause and Effect

Like the ripples in a pond disturbed by a stone, each rule we set down for our fictional world pushes out a series of consequences.

Writing

A Recipe for Character

They are silly, sometimes wrong, bickering, and earnest human beings. How they say something and interact is more interesting than the ostensible topic at hand.

Effective Story Telling

Story Telling without Words

What are the images you see and the sounds you hear communicating to you?