by Joe Bunting |
I’m editing a book by an author who lives outside the US. Most of the novel takes place in locations I’ve never seen except in pictures. Sometimes there are words I don’t understand The book has a strangeness I find captivating. Since working on it, I started to wonder if I could write something outside of my own cultural tradition.
Why? Except for his histories, Shakespeare wrote plays that took place in exotic locations like Florence and Scotland. Nearly all of Hemingway’s novels took place outside of the US, usually in Europe or the Caribbean.
We like stories that feel a little foreign.
by Joe Bunting |
One of the great gifts a writer can give to the world is to tell someone else’s story.
I learned this when I started ghostwriting: no credit, no glory, just the knowledge that without me, the story wouldn’t be told. It’s surprisingly satisfying.
If you’re still trying to write stories about yourself, I want to challenge you to try your hand at writing someone else’s story. Here are three reasons why…
by Joe Bunting |
The dramatic question is probably the single most important element in an entertaining story. Even if you are a terrible writer, if you can use the dramatic question effectively, people will read your work. The dramatic question lies at the heart of suspense, and, as my father-in-law told me recently, the rewards for writers who do suspense well are disproportionate to all other writing skills. The dramatic question is why Twilight is selling millions of copies and the average literary fiction novel is lucky to sell a few thousand.
by Chihuaha Zero |
Have you ever been trapped?
Not just physically, like in a prison cell, but also emotionally or metally, where someone, or something, imposed control over you. You wanted to get out, but those handcuffs were too tight, that chain too short.
Being trapped is among the recurring themes in Young Adult literature. While it pops up often in general fiction, the theme hits hard and low in teenage fiction, probably because the teenage are often so full of this feeling of being trapped.
by Joe Bunting |
“Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas,” says Frank Warren, “of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
In November 2004, Frank Warren gave out a few hundred postcards to strangers with simple instructions: write a secret you’ve never told anyone before, and mail it back. It was supposed to be a small, community art project, but then something strange happened. All the postcards came back. And then something stranger happened, he kept getting new ones.
Secrets went viral.
Since then, Frank has received over 500,000 postcards, many of which are available on the project’s blog, postsecret.com, or in one of his five books of secrets. The remarkable thing is not how widely Postsecret has spread. What’s shocking is that no one thought of it before.
by Dan Schmidt |
We give names to most everything around us: our pets, our kids, our cars, the products we use, the food we eat (it’s not ‘frozen dairy-like substance’, but Frosty), the games we play. And, as writers, we name our characters, too. In fact, next to the physical characteristics we try to describe, the names of our heroes, villains, band leaders, and shopkeepers are about the most important tool we have for identifying and tracking who is doing what. Good names help both writers and readers move through a story smoothly; bad names put us in a stagecoach on a washed out dirt road.
