Author:
Publisher: Bivens & Jensen Publishing
ISBN: 1935994107
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Jeff Gerke
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599632608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
What's more important to a story: a gripping plot or compelling characters? Literary-minded novelists argue in favor of character-based novels while commercial novelists argue in favor of plot-based stories, but the truth of the matter is this: The best fiction is rich in both. Enter Plot Versus Character. This hands-on guide to creating a well-rounded novel embraces both of these crucial story components. You'll learn to: • Create layered characters by considering personality traits, natural attributes, and backgrounds • Develop your character's emotional journey and tie it to your plot's inciting incident • Construct a three-act story structure that can complement and sustain your character arc • Expose character backstory in a manner that accentuates plot points • Seamlessly intertwine plot and character to create a compelling page-turner filled with characters to whom readers can't help but relate • And much more Filled with helpful examples and friendly instruction, Plot Versus Character takes the guesswork out of creating great fiction by giving you the tools you need to inject life into your characters and momentum into your plots.

Author: Dwight V. Swain
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806139180
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book

Book Description
A jargon-free manual on the basics of developing interesting fictional characters Vibrant, believable characters help drive a fictional story. Along with a clever plot, well-drawn characters make us want to continue reading a novel or finish watching a movie. In Creating Characters, Dwight V. Swain shows how writers can invent interesting characters and improve them so that they move a story along. ?The core of character,” he says in chapter 1, ?lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel implicitly or explicitly, that something is important.” Building on that foundation?the capacity to care?Swain takes the would-be writer step-by-step through the fundamentals of finding and developing ?characters who turn you on.” This basic but thought-provoking how-to is a valuable tool for both the novice and the seasoned writer.

Author: Sandy Marsh
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986900553
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book

Book Description
2 Manuscripts in 1 Book, Including: Character Development and Plotting! Book 1) Character Development: Step-by-Step Essential Story Character Creation, Character Expression and Character Building Tricks Any Writer Can Learn Need to Breathe Life into Your Characters? You may have a great story but if your characters are flat and uninteresting your readers will find your story dull. If your lead protagonist isn't generating empathy, then no one cares what happens to them. Character Development covers every aspect of character building; from developing charismatic and believable people, to making sure they work holistically to drive the narrative forward in realistic ways. Know Your Anti-Hero from Your Antagonist In order to create compelling characters your readers will love, Marsh introduces the reader to 12-character types and explains how and when they are introduced to a story. She demonstrates the importance of instilling flaws to create a balance of human qualities that evolve throughout the novel in captivating ways. Inspires New Connections There will be many thought-provoking subjects for both beginner and experienced authors that will motivate a much deeper conception of characters, some of which include: How Characters are Presented & Revealed Creating Expression Let You Characters Suffer Bringing Characters to Life Use Contradictions Listen to Them Give Your Characters Plenty of Opportunity to Show Up Book 2) Plotting: Step-by-Step Essential Story Plotting, Conflict Writing and Plotline Tricks Any Writer Can Learn Your 'Why' for Writing, Will Also Be Their 'Why' for Reading Are you struggling to take your story to the next level? Would you like to know the best ways to create intrigue and have your readers rave about your book? Plotting is a step-by-step guide that takes you through the process of developing compelling plots from beginning to end. With tips and tricks taken straight from professional writers, the novelist will learn how to use plotlines for maximum effect, while retaining creative freedom. Making Conflict Real Plotting helps the author weave suspense through improved conflict-writing, centered around a developing plot. Characters are challenged, affected and emerge changed in ways that infuse emotions in your readers, so that they cannot help but be personally invested in the welfare of your protagonist. Marsh explains in concise straightforward language and with clear examples, the benefits of knowing where you are going with your novel; where the plotline starts (exposition) to how it ends (resolution) and how working with an overview, helps to captivate readers in terms of the lessons learned and the experience of life through the eyes of your characters. You have made an excellent decision by choosing to learn more about writing characters. So, don't delay it any longer. Take this opportunity and purchase your copy today. Order "Writing Characters" Now!

Author: William Bernhardt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780989378901
Category : Characters and characteristics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book

Book Description
All fiction is character-driven, according to William Bernhardt, despite what you might have heard elsewhere. If your characters don't interest readers, even the most exciting plots will fail. "Action is character," Aristotle wrote, but what does that mean, and how can you use that fundamental principle to create dynamic fiction that will captivate readers? This book explains the relationship between character and plot, and how the perfect melding of the two produces a mesmerizing story. Using examples spanning from The Odyssey to The Da Vinci Code, Bernhardt discusses the art of character creation in a direct and easily comprehended manner. The book also includes exercises designed to help writers apply these ideas to their own writing. William Bernhardt is the author of more than thirty novels, including the blockbuster Ben Kincaid series of legal thrillers. Bernhardt is also one of the most sought-after writing instructors in the nation. His programs have educated many authors now published by major houses. He is the only person to have received the Southern Writers Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (U Penn) and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (OSU), which is given "in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large." The Red Sneaker Writing Center is dedicated to helping writers achieve their literary goals. What is a red sneaker writer? A committed writer seeking useful instruction and guidance rather than obfuscation and attitude. Red sneakers get the job done, and so do red sneaker writers, by paying close attention to their art and craft, committing to hard work, and never quitting. Are you a red sneaker writer? If so, this book is for you.

Author: Holly Lisle
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781468025859
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Get Book

Book Description
No one is BORN a writer (just as no one is BORN a lawyer). We all have to learn the SAME skills. But no matter where you're starting... Even if you have NO story ideas, NO characters, and NO experience, you can finish a complete working plot outline in just SEVEN tiny lessons. If you have ever labored to come up with a GOOD way to start a story...If you have ever stumbled, lost and frustrated, through the MIDDLE of your book...If you have ever wondered,"How do I find an idea worth writing?..". Stop Struggling. Help Is Here. Start with Section One, where I'll give you each step to creating a quick, professional plot outline. I'll do a demonstration, and then, because writers write---they don't just read about writing---you'll do the exercise in which you'll take what I've demonstrated and use it to start building your working plot outline. Step by step, you will: * Figure out your character. You'll decide on the few points about him or her that really matter-but enough to give you a place to start your story, and not so much that you get bogged down in background and never get to your writing. * Decide on your central idea. You'll figure out what actually counts in your story, so you avoid getting bogged down writing details that don't. * Write your opener. You'll learn how to give yourself and your readers a GREAT first look at your character doing something fascinating. * Create your ending. You'll discover one method of planning out a great conclusion. * And rough in your middle... You know...all those pages that used to bog you down when you couldn't figure out what happened next? Not anymore. But That's Just Section One. My Professional Plot Outline Mini-Course also includes seven sequential plot-and-conflict lessons-to make sure you create a story that is tight, fascinating, compelling... ...And as fun for you to write as it will be for your readers to read. Lesson One: What Is NOT A Plot Discover a secret about plots that even most professionals don't know-a secret that has led way too many writers, including countless full-time novelists, in circles trying to figure out why their story is going wrong. Lesson Two: Mix 'N' Match Conflict Even if you have no idea what you want to write about, you can build a solid foundation for a good story in just minutes. Lesson Three: Questions And Answers Once you have conflict under control, you'll find out one technique for giving your story and characters depth, and makig your story unbelievably richer and more interesting. Lesson Four: Candy Bar Scenes You'll discover and apply one critical technique for keeping your story flowing and keeping your interest high from beginning, through treacherous story middle, to gripping ending. Lesson Five: Ordering Scenes For Conflict Learn how to experiment with structure to discover how you can best present your story to your reader. Lesson Six: Filling In The Blanks Now you'll hunt down empty spaces between your candy bar scenes, and fill them with story that MATTERS-not with pointless wandering, characters who sit around thinking, or dialogues that go nowhere. Lesson Seven: Plotting As You Go Stories change as you write them. In your final week of class, you'll learn how to adapt your plot outline to bend with the changes-without breaking your story. I KNOW you can create something amazing, even if you never have before. Why? Because more than ten thousand students just like you have already taken this course. And I hear back from a LOT of them, letting me know they've finished a story, or they've sold their work, or they've published it themselves. You CAN do this. Cheerfully, Holly Lisle

Author: James E. Gunn
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1578860113
Category : Science fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book

Book Description
A fiction-writing text by a well-known sci-fi author, editor and professor.

Author: Nancy Glazener
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199390142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book

Book Description
In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities. Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when literary cultures, traditions, and publishing industries were mainly organized nationally. Literature in the Making examines modern literature's coalescence and institutionalization in the United States, considered as an instructive instance of a phenomenon that was going global. Since modern literature initially offered a way to formulate the value of legacy texts by authors such as Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, however, the development of literature and literary culture in the U.S. was fundamentally transnational. Literature in the Making argues that Shakespeare studies, one of the richest tracts of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, was a key domain in which literature came to be valued both for fuelling modern projects and for safeguarding values and practices that modernity put at risk-a foundational paradox that continues to shape literary studies and literary culture. Bringing together the histories of literature's competing conceptualizations, its print infrastructure, its changing status in higher education, and its life in public culture during the long nineteenth century, Literature in the Making offers a robust account of how and why literature mattered then and matters now. By highlighting the lively collaboration between academics and non-academics that prevailed before the ascendancy of the research university starkly divided experts from amateurs, Literature in the Making also opens new possibilities for envisioning how academics might partner with the reading public.

Author: Gary Saul Morson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804718229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1108

Get Book

Book Description
Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

Author: Joan Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313080402
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book

Book Description
Use popular fairy tales and fairy-tale characters as springboards for learning, and help students develop problem-solving abilities and creative-writing skills. Adaptable to virtually any fairy tale and to a variety of learning environments and levels, these activities will challenge students to move beyond the simplistic study of tales to develop in-depth writing skills.