the writer's block |
The blog
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the writer's block |
The blog
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Over the past six weeks, Game of Thrones fans have endured some of the most stressful 80-minute episodes of television ever created. Visually, the season was stunning, the acting was stellar, and once again Ramin Djawadi proved he’s an international treasure we don’t deserve. But despite the visual effects, performances, epic score, and heart-pounding action, the overall consensus—based on the slew of articles, petitions, memes, and tweets—is disappointment. These last six episodes should’ve been the show’s finest hours, and yet they seem to have fallen short. Why? If writers take nothing else away from this final season, they should realize that audiences don’t want shock and awe they want human stories.
Read the rest of the article on LitReactor. There has always been a lot of emphasis placed on the first line. Many consider it the hook: the sentence that will entice—or deter—the reader from pressing on. To an extent this is true. First lines are important. However, I would argue the emphasis put on them is misplaced. Writers should worry less about crafting the perfect first line and more concerned about crafting an opening that builds momentum.
During my second year at Mason’s MFA program, I took a workshop with Tania James who had recently done a Q+A with Hannah Tinti about what she looks for when she is accepting submissions for One Story. Tania shared the details of the Q+A with us and this in turn led to a larger discussion about narrative. While Tinti likes the basic narrative structure, she has put her own fresh spin on it. The narrative "structure" Tinti uses to asses the stories she reads and the ones that she writes looks something like this:
In my previous post about narrative structure, I discussed the different parts of plot. Like I said before, this model will help you write your own work and/or evaluate/study how other writers craft their narratives. But while this narrative structure is strong, I would like to make an addition to it: the tipping point.
Malcolm Gladwell defines the tipping point as "the one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change."[1] He explains that every tipping point has three characteristics: contagiousness, little things adding up to big things, and change happening in the blink of an eye. ThroughoutThe Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell cites countless examples of this phenomena in order to help us understand why some ideas and business take off and others do not. In the bowls of what used to be Robinson A at George Mason—for as I type this the building is either a) in the process of being demolished or b) has been demolished - in a cubicle of a classroom - that should have been somebody's office - I, along with twenty-one other aspiring fiction writers, watched our professor draw the following diagram onto the whiteboard:
The short answer to the question above is—you guessed it--no. What matters, is what floats your creative boat and falls in line with your writing process. However, if you’ve clicked on this post, odds are you probably want to know why one is not better than other, which category you fall in and/or the pros and cons of each. All of which are valid questions. So let’s get to it, shall we?
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