Study Guides
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21.
Practice Exercises for Fiction Writing Help
Finding a Story Idea Story ideas come from what we are passionate about and from the experiences and emotional situations we must work through in life. In The Writer's Idea Book, author Jack Heffron advises writers to write down the 10 most momentous ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
22.
Focus on the Protagonist in Creative Fiction Writing Help
Focus on the Protagonist in Creative Fiction Writing As much as teachers taught us to think of literature in terms of overarching values and themes, as authors we set out to accomplish something much humbler. As J. Madison Davis puts it in his book Novelist's ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
23.
Plot For Creative Fiction Writing Help
A Short Lecture on Plot Think about one of your favorite stories. How would you describe the plot? In talking about Charles Dickens' novella A Christmas Carol, for instance, I would describe the progression from Marley's ghost's visit to three more visits ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
24.
Point of View for Creative Fiction Writing Help
Point of View for Creative Fiction Writing Who is telling the story you are writing? It's an important choice because it dictates what kind of information the narrator knows, and it reveals the window through which you must tell your story to your readers.
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
25.
Building Strong Characters in Creative Fiction Writing Help
Building Strong Characters in Creative Fiction Writing As humans, we are wired for empathy and vicarious living, so we easily put ourselves into stories if we can identify with what the characters are going through in the emotional and physical situations they ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
26.
Writing Good Dialog in Creative Fiction Help
Writing Good Dialog in Creative Fiction Writing In real life, spoken language together with body language carries mountains of information and, like many if not most writers, you may find it difficult to convey the richness of this in prose. But you have already ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
27.
Using Setting and Building Scenes in Creative Fiction Writing Help
Using Setting and Building Scenes in Creative Fiction Writing François Camoin writes in "The Textures of Fiction," a contribution to Words Overflown by Stars, edited by David Jauss: Fiction is little bits of action ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
28.
Revising Your Creative Fiction Writing Help
Revising: Check Your Scenes for Action, Wants, and Subtlety Jordan Rosenfeld, author of Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, thinks of scenes as using different amounts of the same ingredients, depending on the use of the scene ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
29.
Setting the Tone of Your Story in Creative Fiction Writing Help
Setting the Tone of Your Story in Creative Fiction Writing What is tone? It can seem a hard element to isolate, but we definitely know it when we read it. Compare these two descriptions of the same event: The protest erupted into ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
30.
Endings in Creative Fiction Writing Help
Endings in Creative Fiction Writing Novelist Bharti Kirchner wrote a useful discussion of how to approach endings in the July, 2007, issue of The Writer magazine. In "Step by Step: Write an ending your readers will savor," she reminds us to ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional
