Writing a short story requires almost as much legwork as writing a novel. The author has to bring the story’s characters to life, give them backgrounds, put them in a context, develop a voice and so on and on. It is a lot of investment for 3,000 to 4,000 words. Last week, we sat down […]
Hiring editors like ourselves can be very helpful in solving problems with manuscripts. We read carefully and give our best opinions about what can be done to improve the material. But all we can do is suggest. The writer has to be the final arbiter of what works and doesn’t work to improve an ms. […]
Really. The market for personal stories is so over saturated that memoirs are almost as difficult to sell as works of fiction and as in fiction, they require a strong narrative voice. In other words, it isn’t enough to have a good story to tell. You have to tell it with a strong voice and […]
Much is made on various writing Web Sites about how to format a manuscript for submission to agents and editors. The ms. should be double spaced, in 12 point courier font and, if in hard copy, on 8″ by 11″ white paper. An agent told us once that this is because the book industry has […]
One school of thought has it that book narrators are honor-bound to reveal all they know as they know it over the course of a book. This “rule” applies in particular to first-person narrators who can only avoid it by deliberately misleading the reader. The key word here is deliberate. It is what prevents these […]
Recently, we found ourselves empathizing with a plastic bag, the unlikely protagonist in an 18 minute film that has gone viral on the Internet. Directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by German film director Werner Herzog, “Plastic Bag” follows the endless life cycle of a super market plastic bag as it is first employed in […]
Some writers choose to write from multiple points of view. There are reasons to do this if say a personal perspective is needed along with a third person overview to describe events at which the first person narrator is/was not present. In Edith Wharton’s ETHAN FROME, a first person narrator speaks in a prologue and […]
Many classic novels were written from the omniscient third person point of view, an all-seeing God-like perspective. Jane Austin, Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy all wrote this way. While it was commonly used historically, it is a less comfortable form for today’s writers. Here is an excerpt from PRIDE AND PREJUDICES that illustrates this: “Mr. […]
The third person point of view is the most commonly used in literature. It gives the author the most flexibility. It uses the pronouns, he, she, it and they. If you are writing along in third person and find yourself breaking into an I, me or you, you have broken the third wall of literature […]
In the second person, the narrator tells the story to another character using you and the action is experienced through the you’s point of view. Few books and stories are written in the second person. But you may know songs that are sung from the you viewpoint. An often cited example of a book written […]