“The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.” -THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX by Kate DiCamillo If you are going to address your story to a “dear reader” as DiCamillo does in the quote from her award-winning children’s book above, you […]
The following paragraph is written by us but is representative of what we are getting from clients: The last week in January, he would walk the snow-covered streets, thinking of his wife who was ill at home. Her cough told him that these would be her last days. During his solitary walk, he would feel […]
“I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.” Bennie seemed to be waiting for more. “A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now.” The washed up guitar player, cum janitor, who makes these statements is a character in Jennifer Egan’s […]
One of our blog readers noted the length of the sentences in WHEN THE KILLING’S DONE, the TC Boyle book that was the subject of our last blog. She, helpfully, sent along some examples like this one: It was May of 1979 and all the good feelings — the vibrations, the groove — of the […]
Building suspense in a novel or non-fiction book is largely all about the meting out of information, telling the reader just enough to string her or him along without giving the plot away. The tendency – if our clients are anything to go by – is to tell too much. Novice writers sometimes think readers […]
Recently through another blog, we came across the following web site: http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/egan/ Accompanied by some creepily contemplative music, the site opens to the depiction of a castle with blinking yellow windows backed by a billow of clouds. Across the keep is written “Hotel” and the viewer understands that the site is promoting a hotel called […]
Visiting a good friend last week, we went to see the 1976 Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was retro Wednesday at the 1909 opera house in the small town where she lives. The movie – with an outlaw hero and the Redlegs, an adjunct of the Union Army, in pursuit – is […]
“What does it take to persuade–to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they […]
How often, we caution our clients to avoid obvious cliché and find new ways of saying things. Now, it turns out that the “new” ways writers find to say things may just be accepted novel-speak, what word expert Ben Zimmer calls the “jargon of the novel’ in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Zimmer, […]
Here is a link to a video discovered by a young colleague that answers the question, what is the future of publishing. No matter what your opinion on that score, you will have to agree with at least a half of the presentation which was the brain child of U.K. publisher, Dorling Kindersley Books. Watch […]