Writer Unboxed

His moniker is unusual, but his debut novel even more so. Ara 13‘s book DRAWERS AND BOOTHS is the first metafiction-genre novel I’d read, and it was wild. Genre switch-ups, characters that speak directly to the reader, deliberate authorial intrusions make Drawers and Booths both unsettling and exhilarating. It’s a slim novel, almost a novelette, [...]

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Plot Month continues on WU. Enjoy! The distinction between story and plot is a deceptively simple one. Story: what happened Plot: the artful rearrangement of what happened in a way that keeps your readers engaged. A police report is a story told as a series of facts, in chronological order: August 29 2008. At approximately [...]

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When Therese told me that WU would focus on plotting this month, my original reaction was, “Uh-oh.” Plotting is by far the most challenging part of writing for me. However, since I was plotting and carrying out a novella through January, it was a good time to observe the process. There are several challenges: –A [...]

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Kath here. We’ve been waiting and waiting, and now it’s here. Valued contributor Ray Rhamey’s book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Ray says “it should be printed and shipped within 2 or 3 weeks and early orders will be tremendously helpful.” He’s making a FANTASTIC offer for WU [...]

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Today’s main post won’t be about plotting but will be a special announcement that will be up in several hours. Still, we didn’t want to the day to pass without a little plot talk. I happened upon an interesting article on Associated Content this past weekend. Here’s the synopsis: This article is for the person [...]

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Is it springtime yet? I’m reeeeaaally ready for it. Until then, here are some newsy tidbits of interest to writers: Awww. I just started watching American Idol this season, and I wanted to feel guilty because it’s t.v. crack, not because they are exploiting their writers (a sad theme in the “reality” television industry): A [...]

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I’ve read a lot of unboxed fiction in my service to WU, but I have to be honest. DRAWERS & BOOTHS, the debut release of author Ara 13, takes the box and shreds it. When we were first offered the opportunity to interview Ara 13, we were told that he writes in the literary genre [...]

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Plot Month continues on WU . . . I believe that the events of a story—plot—should spring from character, not simply be things that happen to her. It is what a character decides to do that should create events, not the other way around. To see how decisions cause events, consider this boy on his [...]

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Plot Month continues with contributor Sophie Masson’s advice on plotting. Enjoy!  The great children’s writer Philip Pullman has observed that one of the reasons children’s and YA literature is often in a much stronger position than adult fiction, particularly so-called ‘literary’ fiction, is that writers for kids can’t afford to lose sight of story. And at [...]

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Plotting month continues here at WU. This week, I reached into the archives and plucked out a post on outlining that I wrote two years ago. Outlining can be an important part of plotting, especially if your story becomes ultra-complex with multiple storylines, POVs and the like. I gravitate toward complex storytelling, but I’m a [...]

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Plot month continues on WU. There are as many different ways to plot as their are people to write stories, by which I mean, there is no right way to plot. My rule has always been the simpler, the better. For many writers, the simplest frame for plotting out a novel-length story is the three-act [...]

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Missed part 1 of my interview with YA author A.S. King? Click HERE, then come back. Her debut novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs isn’t your average high-concept book (teenage pirate cursed to live the lives of 100 dogs before returning to a human body with all of her memories intact…including where the treasure is [...]

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