Writer Unboxed

In a recent post, Kath alluded to night-writing friends, and I’ll confess I’m one of them. I don’t know what it is about the evening hours, but my muse starts to dance whether I’m sleepy or not. Maybe it’s because I’m working frenetically 9-5ish on freelance writing, and in the evening I feel all loose [...]

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A script can’t be written like a novel. But can a novelist learn something by leaning over the shoulder of a screenwriter? Clear character action/reaction and dialogue make up 99% of a good script; a character’s musings are nearly impossible to convey on the big screen. A novelist, on the other hand, can linger in [...]

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The distance between people who actually write novels, and people who talk about writing novels, is wide. Between them lies a chasm, the pit that defines the pro from the amateur: actual results from setting fingers to keypad and doing it. There’s only one way the talker can become the doer, and that’s to get [...]

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One of the things we like to do is analyze movies for the storytelling structure. Our latest film analysis is the Joss Whedon sci-fi flick, Serenity. Whedon’s movie is an outgrowth of his t.v. series Firefly. Fox TV abused the show by giving it crappy time slots and showing the episodes out of order before [...]

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This from USA Today’s blog, “Pop Candy”: Amazon.com has lauched a feature where authors can connect with fans through blog updates, book recommendations, reviews and more. So far more than 1,000 authors have joined Amazon Connect, including Rick Moody, Elizabeth Kostova and Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox. Moody, by the way, highly recommends Brian Wilson’s SMiLE [...]

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Recently, Kathleen and Therese chatted with bestselling romance author Lydia Joyce about career and craft. Enjoy! Interview with Lydia Joyce Q: Your successful debut novel THE VEIL OF NIGHT and your equally-successful follow-up, MUSIC OF THE NIGHT, have been described as having a gothic quality. Was that intentional? A: Yes! I love the Gothics of [...]

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And so the evil Santino, in a slash of scissors and a gnash of cruel bon-mots, lives to sew another day. What attracts me to Project Runway, aside from the clever setting and fashionable clothing, are the characters. Like fiction writers, the producers of Project Runway carefully blend their characters for maximum conflict and easy [...]

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My inlaws are leaving town tomorrow, meandering off for parts undiscovered. I have pretty awesome inlaws, so you won’t hear me rejoicing about their leaving (and I’m not just saying that because they might happen upon this blog post someday!). They love to travel, and so do I. This spring I’ll take the kids to [...]

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I was going to post another analysis of the Storytelling Magic of Project Runway, but that can wait for another day. This discussion on book openers has me, erm, hooked. Writers of fiction are pretty familiar with the term hook. Sol Stein calls it the moment when the story’s engine gets started. It’s a good [...]

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