...is finding a main event that the whole film or play builds towards. And if that main event is interesting enough, all you have to do is build backwards to it so that secretly, as a writer, your little trick is that you know that no one has any idea that where you’re going is pretty fascinating.
Story Goals vs Plot Goals: There's a difference between story goals and plot goals. Story goals are the larger thematic goals that usually describe the character growth or the idea behind the tale. They're more conceptual, and work as a guide in determining the types of plot goals your protagonist will encounter. Plot goals are the physical things your protagonist does to achieve those more lofty story goals.
Story goal: To find love again after a bad breakup. (this is what the story is about)
Plot goal: To go to the museum and talk to cute guys. (this is one thing the protagonist does during the story)
From Goal - Conflict - Stakes. Why You Need All Three
. The book is billed as an all-new definitive guide to writing imaginative fiction and takes a completely novel approach, fully exploiting the visual nature of fantasy through original drawings, maps, renderings, and exercises to create a spectacularly beautiful and inspiring object.I stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.Today it was announced that Alice Munro, the renowned short-story writer, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Alice Munro has published many short stories.Interview with Alice Munro, Paris Review
If you only write when you are inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet but you will never be a novelist.
Neil Gaiman
I always tell students, when I teach writing, to locate their obsessions, and look to them when they’re searching for the story they should be telling. When a writer attaches her work to the engine of what she cares about most passionately (even irrationally, perhaps) the work will be infused with a similar passion, I believe. And come into being most organically.
Joyce Maynard
My mother died at 99. After her death, I was kind of at loose ends and Bed and Breakfast guests suggested that I go back to school and get a degree in creative writing. So I filled out an application form. And they accepted me. And somebody told me that I ought to write murder mysteries. And two years later, my first murder mystery was published by St. Martin's Press. I've now had 10 published and I have the eleventh on Kindle and I'm working on the twelfth right now. Well now, my first book was published when I was 70.
I essentially taught myself to write in the 3 hours of her napping. I've learned to kind of compartmentalize. I will run the story in my head non-stop, I am constantly chewing over the next thing I have to write. Then by the time I am actually in front of my computer. It's typing. It's just process at that point.I particularly liked how he carved out this time and focused his writing energies.
"Book was written on nights and weekends, in close to nine months. I went to The Writer's Workshop and they teach you that what you want to do is get up at eight o'clock and sit down at nine o'clock and from nine o'clock to twelve o'clock and you just stay at your desk and you write. Then you get up have lunch and edit.
"I tried it. You have two years of uninterrupted time to do nothing but write. And let me tell you, it works. There is something that happens. It is like you are training your body to get into this state.
"What I would find is that your body starts to realize that at nine o'clock you're going to being sitting down, so for the first 3 or 4 months the first 20 minutes are just woolgathering or wasted time. But gradually as you train your body you get to this point where you sit down, you start. You're off to the races. Because all the subconscious woolgathering has been going on while you're taking a shower while you're making breakfast as you are preparing to sit down. This was a very useful tool that does not work when you have a day job. And does not work when you have to come home at night and sit down when you've spent the whole day writing. So it's just catch as catch can. Staying up late and trying to work out because that does help a little bit, and just sticking to it."
In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen.There is a lot of chatter about the discovery that Rudyard Kipling found inspiration for the Jungle Book in other works.
Very sincerely, Rudyard Kipling
It isn't what your characters say; it's what they really mean. "Subtext"--what characters are saying between the lines. The subtext is all the underlying drives and meanings that are not apparent to the character, but that are apparent to the audience or reader.
Paraphrased from Subtext: The Delicate Art of Doublespeak
Man puts a log on the fire. His wife says that she wasn't cold, that there is no need to stoke the fire further. He responds that he puts a log on the fire every night, that the house will grow cold otherwise.The focus of the argument is about handling the fire in the fireplace, but the subtext is a deeper tension between the wife and her husband.
"Then put on a blanket," she shoots back, "or a sweater. Why do you need to fiddle with the fireplace."
"It's just a moment, the fire is already burning. Another log doesn't take any preparation."
"You've got to clean the fireplace. Don't you even think before you put on the log!"
"It's just a damn log. Fine I'll take it off, if that will make you happy."
To say little and convey much, to break the mood of the scene with some completely irrelevant wisecrack without entirely losing the mood — these small things for me stand in lieu of accomplishment. My theory of fiction writing … is that the objective method has hardly been scratched, that if you know how to use it you can tell more in a paragraph than the probing writers can tell in a chapter.
