Tag: craft
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The Filtering Consciousness of Your Characters
Fiction is not just the record of an event; it is the interpretation of the meaning of that event by someone. The biases and convictions of that filtering consciousness will express a truth the story cannot do without—and you get to manipulate that! How fun! –Dianne Orsini, Professor of English and Creative Writing Teacher My…
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Writing, Point of View and Mind on the Page
Point of View, like chess, is the simplest and most complicated pleasure yet devised for just the kind of mind that would take Creative Writing online. If Character is the casting call and Plot is what happens next, then Point of View is how you set up the camera angles and which lenses you’ll use.…
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Italo Calvino, The Micro Chapter and Writing What Interests You
Calvino was brave because he sat down to write what interested him – not what might interest other people. He had a day job in a publishing house, and he sought neither celebrity nor wealth. He was the extreme other of the creative writing course wannabe. He loved the short fictional form, which was a…
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The Map is Not the Terrain-Jon Franklin and His Outline
With the last of t he edits underway on my new publication, The House, due for release in Fall 2009, I’ve found myself pondering my next story. A novel, the idea came to me sometime last week. I now realize it popped into my head after overhearing a conversation wherein a middle-aged woman in speaking…
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Have Character, But No Story?
Stories come to us in many ways. Some of us receive them in images, others in certain ideal we desire to see played out. Some of us get the plot. And the some of us get taken by a character that won’t let us go. They fill our thoughts and days. We listen to them…
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