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How to describe clothing in a story (with examples)
The clothes a person wears tells us many things: their status in life, for example, or their cultural affiliation or identity. They can tell us what era they live in, and even a person's current state of mind or intent. Understanding how to describe clothing in a story well will help y...
January 29th, 2024
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How to write a scene: Nailing purpose and structure
Understanding how to keep a scene interesting is a crucial skill for writing a novel or screenplay. Scenes are the basic building blocks of a chapter or act. Read on for tips on how to write a scene, plus analysis of story scene examples What is a scene exactly? The word scene broadly mean...
March 4th, 2024
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What makes a good story? 10 elements
What makes a good story? Understanding the key elements of a great story and what satisfies readers regardless of finer details (such as genre) will help you write a more successful book. We're satisfied when stories achieve certain effects, such as moving us, inspiring us to wonder. With the ad...
January 8th, 2024
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5 ways to start a story: Choosing a bold beginning
Great authors show us there are many ways to start a story. You could begin a novel with a narrator/character introducing himself, like Salinger's Holden Caufield or Dickens' David Copperfield. Or you could begin in the thick of action, as Ray Bradbury's does in his classic novel, Fahrenhei...
January 21st, 2024
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How to write your life story: 7 tips to start
Aspiring autobiographers often mail us asking, 'how can I write my own personal story?' How can I craft a compelling narrative?' It can seem like a daunting task writing and researching your life experiences. It can be a challenging writing project, but a valuable and creative one. It's a...
February 4th, 2024
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10 key takeaways from Bird by Bird
Here are 10 key takeaways from a book that has become iconic: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by memoirist and novelist Anne Lamott. It’s been nearly three decades since it was published in 1994. In the years since it’s become something of a cult book, recommended by writ...
October 22nd, 2023
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Writing my novel with the Now Novel process
In the following months I'll be blogging about my own novel writing journey using the Now Novel process, from the highs to the lows, and how I manage to navigate them. For years, I have lived with the bare bones of a story I want to set partly on a resort in the North West part of South Afr...
November 12th, 2023
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Making dialogue sound natural
Whether you’re writing a novel or a short story, you are going to want to make your dialogue natural and true to real life, as it’s spoken in the real world. How do you go about achieving this, when ‘natural dialogue’ can be boring to read if you write it verbatim? As to why you should make y...
December 3rd, 2023
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Decoding the Hero's Journey
Whether you're a fan of mythology or simply interested in the art of storytelling, let's delve into the world of the Hero's Journey. What is the Hero's Journey or the monomyth? The Hero’s Journey is a widely recognised pattern of storytelling and is essentially a circular storytelling ...
January 15th, 2024
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Exploring the structure of Freytag's Pyramid
Storytelling is at the heart of our human interactions. We tell stories when we talk to each other, explaining what has happened in our lives. We also pay money to consume stories in the form of movies, theatre, books and so on. So many stories use the Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) method, and...
March 18th, 2024
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Impact of introductions, prologues, prefaces and forewords
‘I was told that novels shouldn’t have prologues,’ a writer said to me recently. We had been discussing her novel, and I was suggesting that she could add a prologue to it to strengthen as aspect of the story. She said that she was under the impression that a prologue would slow or delay the...
April 15th, 2024
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Elevate writing using literary devices
Recognize any of these literary device?'It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.' – Charles Dickens'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.' The Dickens quote, from the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is an example of anaphora, while the Peter piper tongue twister might have be...
May 6th, 2024
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