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Content We Crave
What do you want from a story? How does this differ over time? What do you think other people want from their stories? When writing your own, which human cravings are you catering to? Overweening pride, lust, natural disaster, sheer avarice, all varieties of personal weirdness, terrible things done by polite and decent people — […]
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Dystopia, Apocalypse and Climate Fiction
According to a large portion of the world’s population, humankind is already living in a dystopia.
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Television Endings
It’s impossible to say anything about television endings without first drawing a sharp line down the middle of two very different narratives: The storytelling in each looks quite different. CASE STUDIES The Sopranos When I was talking to HBO recently, I told them about a big learning experience I had thanks to the finale of […]
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Film Endings
In general, film endings are no different from any other form of narrative. Films—more than anything, in fact—tend to adhere to storytelling structure. That said, there are a few misconceptions about film endings. HOLLYWOOD DOES NOT SELL HAPPY There’s this misconception that Hollywood movies generally have happy endings, and that a general Hollywood audience won’t […]
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How Do Writers Deal With Phones In Fiction?
Phones have not been good for fiction. Phones counteract every storytelling guideline. Throw your character into peril, we’re told. Endanger their very lives, we’re told. But if this character has a phone, or should have a phone, the audience asks, “Why don’t they just…?” and that is about the last thing you want your audience […]
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Lampshading in storytelling. What is that?
“Lampshading” is one of my favourite and least favourite writer tricks: It’s where you acknowledge a shortcoming in your plot through some dialogue, usually jokey, as a way of winking at the audience and moving on.
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On Exposition
This is from a book on screenwriting by Robert McKee, but applies also to picturebooks. I’m surprised at how much it sounds like that terrible dating book written for women The Rules. (I saw the authors on Oprah years ago.) Parse out exposition bit by bit though the entire story. You can reveal exposition well into […]
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Three Ways Of Looking At Character
There are many ways of looking at character: flat vs rounded, static vs dynamic and stylised versus natural. These distinctions are explained below. FLAT/ROUNDED Is this character more ‘flat’ or more ’rounded’? This distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, who said that a round character is one who is […]
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Littera scripta manet The Written Word Will Remain
“The written word will remain” Which words will we leave as our legacy? What we have published in books and magazines, or what we have published on blogs and ezines and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook…? A few years ago I set about inputting all of our known family data into a family tree program. […]
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Unusual Eating Phobias
Getting annoyed at someone when we listen to them eating or breathing is called Misophonia, and it’s an actual neurological disorder. Here are some more strangely specific fears: Header painting: Adolphe Millot illustration of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables from Nouveau Larousse Illustre, (1898) fruits and vegetables
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Things Possible With Digital Stories Which Are Not So Possible With Paper Stories
A lot is being said about all the ways in which ebooks and tablet books are not as good as ‘real books’: you can’t smell them, there’s screen glare, you don’t know where you are up to in the book… Ebooks “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another […]
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The Opposite Of Beer Brewed By Monks
Episode 55 of the 99% Invisible podcast goes into the strange psychological phenomenon whereby certain consumers will pay huge amounts for a scarce commodity. Alcohol and handbags seem especially open to this marketing manipulation, and in this case beer, not because beer connoisseurs are being manipulated per se, but because there is a monastery in Germany whose […]
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The Secret Self In Storytelling
All of us have a Public, Private and a Secret Self.
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Decisions To Make When Storyboarding For Interactive Books
First things first: Does this story require an active and alert reader, and do the interactions reward interactivity and alertness? 1. Should interactions be user-initiated or autoplay? A mixture? I prefer narration to autoplay, with the option of turning it off completely from the main menu. When I have to press a button to start […]
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Do You Look Like Your Dog?
There are some researchers, who’ve been very lucky with their funding, who have studied the ways in which pets resemble their owners. If you’ve ever been to a dog show you’ll probably have noticed the phenomenon yourself. Sure enough, it’s been noted that when shown a random mixture of owner/pet photos, people are able to match […]