Teases 2

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Steven Spielberg teases us in the openings of the Indiana Jones movies. Each movie opens with the end of some previous adventure. Thus the audience is immediately plunged into exciting action that poses intriguing story questions of great urgency. Will Indy get run over by that huge boulder? Will he reach the antidote in time? Will that rhinoceros neuter him? Spielberg definitely has our

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Teases

Monday, January 23, 2006

Hooks hook whether they relate to the core conflict or not. So, in mainstream fiction today the emphasis is on irresistible bait rather than on rigid classical form. Such hooks are short-range story questions called teases. Teases are attention-grabbing devices to arouse curiosity with catchy story questions. To pose them the story opens with some exciting action or dialog and plunges the reader

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Vision: A Resource for Writers

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus from posting. I have been really down with the flue this past week. You can normally expect two or three tips per week.See my article entitled Writing to the Imagination in the current issue (#31) of Vision: A Resource for Writers. And a great bimonthly resource it is, with many great articles on writing.

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The Classic Hook - 3

Friday, January 13, 2006

In a first-person novel, the narrator is a character. Just plain curiosity about the narrator can serve as another hook. Mark Twain arouses this curiosity masterfully in the opening of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.And that brilliant stroke of reverse psychology makes us

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The Classic Hook - 2

Saturday, January 7, 2006

Here is another example of the classic hook via long-range story questions about the core conflict — the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), literary fiction by Harper Lee.When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left

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The Classic Hook

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

The hardest part of a novel is the opening. Your opening story questions must hook the reader. You must decide whether to pose long-range story questions about the core conflict or catchy short-range story questions about exciting action or dialog in the opening scene. Which can hardly be about the core conflict, because you haven't set up the core conflict yet.Here's an example of the classic,

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Sagging Suspense

Monday, January 2, 2006

The most common problem with novels good enough to consider for publication is that they sag in the middle. The story loses momentum, suspense flags, and the reader is no longer curious about what will happen next.You can fix this problem and improve almost any first or second draft by cutting the weakest scene. Just find the scene where your own interest flags, and eliminate it. If possible,

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