At the end of last year, an award-winning Australian film director told me that people often asked him how to best learn to become a filmmaker. His response – study Breaking Bad created by Vince Gilligan.
Like many of the ground-breaking cable television series, Breaking Bad unfolds like a good novel. David Simon, who created The Wire, another great series, pitched the crime writer, George Pelecanos, to join the writing team with the concept that The Wire was like a novel for television.
In fiction, particularly commercial fiction, the most important thing is to keep your reader turning the pages. This is what the art and craft of writing fiction is all about.
As the English novelist, E.M. Forster said in his book Aspects of the Novel, a story “… has only one merit: that of making an audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”
Once you’ve written the best novel you can and feel ready to get your novel published and release it to the world, the first decision you must make is whether to self-publish or pursue a traditional publishing deal. This article explores the pros and cons of both paths.
The British author services firm, Reedsy, describes self-publishing vs traditional publishing as one of the great debates of the literary world.
Self-publishing authors sing the praises of having creative control, not having to deal with the publishing gatekeepers and receiving higher royalties.
This fourth article in our publishing series aims to explain why the synopsis, along with the Query letter, is such an important tool when seeking representation from a literary agent or publisher.
A synopsis is an overview of your manuscript. Writing it forces you to define your story and capture its essence, conveying that you are in command of your material, in an engaging manner. It is an artform in itself. The quality of your synopsis will determine whether an agent or publisher will read your full manuscript. Most agents and publishers simply do not have time to read every manuscript they receive.
Crack the champagne or mineral water! You have finally finished the manuscript of your novel, having written numerous drafts, ideally had it assessed by a professional editor to ensure it is the best story you are capable of writing and are now ready to put your creative baby out into the world.
If you have decided to go down the traditional publishing route, you will need to engage with the business of writing, especially when seeking representation from a literary agent or publisher. This requires a very different mindset from the one that created your novel.
Writing a novel or screenplay is an art and a craft that requires writers to go outside their comfort zone and understand the challenges of the creative process.
To fully harness your creative potential, it is essential to grasp the subtleties of the creative process and understand how at first, elements of the craft of writing and storytelling can often feel counter-intuitive or counter-instinctive.
Writing is an art and a craft. If you want to write a novel or screenplay that other people are going to want to read, you have to learn how to craft your story from beginning to end.
In this blog we are going to talk about the critical opening of your story.
John Truby is a Hollywood screenwriting teacher and story consultant who shares many of the beliefs we hold about the process of storytelling and structure.
One of the key lessons we took away from this interview with him is that a good story and good writing comes as a result of sound structure and a well thought out, step-by-step process. You cannot really judge your work until you’ve completed the process.