by Joe Bunting |
I used to think you should start a novel on page one with a bang, that you should throw the reader straight into conflict. I heard agents and publishers want a novel full of conflict, one that immediately hooks them, and I thought, I can do that. So I cut out all my world building and backstory and focused on the central plot from the very beginning.
Now I know how misguided I was. While it’s true you can take too long to introduce conflict to your novel, there is such a thing as too much, too soon.
by Joe Bunting |
Have you ever thought about that? Detective stories, murder mysteries, legal thrillers—these are among the most popular genres in popular literature, but have you ever thought about why people like them so much?
by Joe Bunting |
My name is Anna and I am from Filer, Idaho, where the men fight over water rights and the women over 1st place ribbons for peach pie. I lived with my four sisters in the attic of my parent’s barn-red farmhouse with purple and orange shag carpet. When I was fifteen, I would sneak out my window to meet Brett. Brett sang me songs on his guitar and shared his dreams about becoming the next John Lennon. Two years later, on the night Brett left, he gave me a pale green sapphire ring with delicate flanking diamonds. A ring which—two years after that—my mother made me throw in the trash because she (who’d married a man who’d given her a twenty year-old daughter and a nineteen year-old marriage certificate) had found the man I would marry.
by Joe Bunting |
A few years ago I was heading for Hollywood. My script had found its way into the hands of actors Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint. Everyone loved it. Then, one of them, Jack or Eva, killed it. My story, they said, “devolved into melodrama.”
I retreated, determined to discover why fiction flops, and more importantly, “how fiction works.” And I did. I tell the story in a new eBook, “STORY STRUCTURE TO DIE FOR.”
