WATCH ON YOUTUBE Here’s a fun writing game to unlock new fields of interest and create a study course that can help fill your commonplace book. Write a numbered list of 10 descriptive words (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) that you love or find evocative. Write a numbered list of 10 subjects, disciplines or classes that interest… Read More
We’ve previously looked at how to express story structure through dialogue, and in this article I’d like to draw on Hamlet for some techniques for writing subtext in dialogue. ☞ You might also want to pick up the dialogue worksheet and the good dialogue checklist.
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will— – Hamlet The One Page Novel structure isn’t just useful for plotting your novel. Over the years, I’ve found it an invaluable tool for studying the workings of stories I’ve read, of characters I love, of… Read More
In How to Be the Heroine of Your Own Story we discuss ‘Stasis characters’; these are characters who are endemic to the hero’s Stasis state and who exert pressure (whether well-meaning or not) to keep them there. The ghost in Hamlet is an archetypal character of this kind. Here are some of the persuasive (or… Read More
I love collecting stationery. And recently I’ve also begun collecting poems about stationery. Poets not infrequently mention the instruments of their trade – Byron’s praise of his “grey goose-quill” springs to mind, or Sidney “biting [his] truant pen” – but I’ve tried to concentrate my collation on poems that have stationery items as their central… Read More