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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 9, 2007 | Category : General |
One piece of wisdom that dominates the writing world and is passed on at every opportunity, is the injunction ‘write don’t tell’. What does it mean? I’ll try to demonstrate.
Your character wants to buy a dress for her show. Now that she has the money, she has the courage to walk into Emporia A... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 8, 2007 | Category : General |
Most of us, when writing a first draft simply power on, driven by the urge to get the story written. But it is a sound idea to set the time-span for a story. It creates parametres and gives rise to a lot of extra material to enrich the text - and for the purposes of NaNoWriMo, helps increase the w... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 7, 2007 | Category : General |
I looked up from my writing last night and saw huge slashes of vivid, orange--pink, across the horizon. An almost - but not quite - dazzling rope of honeyed light seemed to lie behind it, making it luminous. I wondered - as you do - about how I might introduce it into my work. And it struck me t... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 6, 2007 | Category : General |
There are times when I fall into the trap of judging my writing progress according to how many words I’ve produced and sometimes that leads to disappointment. Last night was one of those times.
I sat down to write but nothing much would come. I might have mentioned before that this tends to mak... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 5, 2007 | Category : General |
If you have personal or specialist knowledge of a community you might consider using it in your novel. A subsidiary character could be as effective in this position as the protagonist. It has been done successfully in Asian novels from Britain and the USA and I have recently been totally swept off... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 4, 2007 | Category : General |
I came across some references to Gone With the Wind this weekend. It reminded me how the impact of the Civil War enhanced and intensified the novel, driving the lives of the characters, forcing them to the very edge. It also provided plenty of the 'take-away factor' that amanda Ross of Richard and... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 4, 2007 | Category : General |
Long narratives should have a varied pace. Like a long journey, its terrain will inevitably be varied. Arduous elements of story will require judicious, measured handling; there will be breathless movement; slower, information-loaded segments; there should also be intervals of rest, islands of pea... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 2, 2007 | Category : General |
I’ve just finished Away, a novel by Amy Bloom. It’s a beautifully written picaresque novel written from inside the character’s head, in magnificently striking language and imagery. Being picaresque, it allows scope for plenty of different characters to drift in and out of the life of the ... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on November 2, 2007 | Category : General |
Got off to a good start last night and I managed to write quite a bit today with my Instant Writing technique. 920 words, actually, in tiny snippets of time, mainly while waiting - for trains (on the train, of course, waiting to get to my destination) for my daughter's cheese muffins to bake etc. e... Read more...
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| Posted by Shahrukh Husain on October 31, 2007 | Category : General |
12 hours to go and I reckon it’s time to start getting on our knees – it could be to pray – but I was thinking more in terms of ‘get set, GO’.
Time to grasp the nettle, grab the bull by the horns, beard the lion in his den. For all those clichés, read TACKLE THE PLOT.
I agree with all those... Read more...
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