I don’t think this category needs a lot of explanation.
I am a writer, and I like to write about writing. Posts can be about something I noticed, or learned.
If you don’t write yourself, this category might not be for you, but who doesn’t write at least ocassionally in their work? Not all of my blog posts apply to e-mails or reports, but some definitely do.
Also, knowing more about writing can help you better appreciate novels, or — be warned — ruin them for you.
Forsooth, let me this fine day speak of that most virulent of ailments that afflicts many a well-intentioned craftsman of the written word: purple prose. Not just stories can contain purple prose, but any written text: blog posts, theses, and even simple book reports.
I wrote about the seven-point story structure a few weeks ago. I already hinted at other ways to look at a structure. Joseph Campbell introduced the Monomyth in 1949 in his book the Hero of a Thousand Faces. Campbell was not actually describing a way to structure stories, but doing a comparative analyses of various myths and finding an archetypical underlying structure. Knowing what this structure is can help you recognize strengths and weaknesses in your own stories, and is interesting to know, even for non-writers. Below, I’ll describe what the monomyth is and how you can use it.
When I started writing a novel for the first time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I made a list of cool events that led to what I considered a cool ending, then started writing. That was back in the days of the dial-up modem, when you couldn’t look up a thousand articles about writing on your smartphone. I had little knowledge about how to structure a story. I learned a lot since then, and actually finished a novel-sized story.
I experimented a lot with different ways to set up a story structure. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can follow along the lines of the monomyth, use the five-act structure, or any number of other structures. Today I’ll talk about the seven-point structure, which is a more detailed version of the three-act structure.
I’ve been playing the Walking Dead, season 2, a video game about the zombie apocalypse, as you can see in the screenshot above. It got me thinking, and I’m going to take a look at the zombie apocalypse from a writer’s perspective.
Writing a story is like juggling; there are a lot of considerations spinning through the air and you somehow have to keep all of them up. You have to have snappy dialog, but paced well, good description, but not too much, character arcs, a well thought-out plot, and so forth.
To be able to take all these considerations correctly into account, you first need to know what they are, and what can go wrong. You need to know when your writing smells, and what it smells of. The writing smell for today: white room syndrome.