Storytelling is as old as human DNA. As old as language. As old as Joe Neanderthal sitting around the fire at the mouth of his cave, telling the group what happened that day.
“Me went hunting, threw rock at rabbit, killed it, brought it back. Good day. Ug.”
Okay, that’s a story, as far as it goes. Short, sweet, direct. But what’s missing? How might Joe have ramped up the tension in his story? How might he have grabbed the interest of his fellows, and pulled them in emotionally so they were invested in the outcome? Conflict.
How about this: Continue reading “Conflict: The Heart of Storytelling”
I’m guessing that most of us are always on the outlook for ways to increase our productivity, to open wider to inspiration, and get/keep the ideas flowing. But writing, like any art, is a process that defies capture, that eludes attempts to analyze, to reduce, to constrain. What works for one person won’t work for the next. All we can do is keep trying new things, or simply keep doing what has worked for us in the past. On a whim, I wrote my latest book in longhand.
I’m working on the last chapter or two of my current WIP (I sometimes wait until the book is done to break it up into chapters). The ending is, of course, the culmination of everything that has gone before; it’s the climax, the resolution, the payoff. And if I’ve done my job well enough, it’s delicious.
Recently I’ve learned about a new (to me) term: catfishing. It means someone pretending to be what they are not. In terms of selling books on the Internet, this basically boils down to someone posing as an expert in a given field, then writing short, pithy eBooks using information easily and freely accessible on the Internet (think Wikipedia) and then passing it off as a definitive guide on Amazon.