I just started watching Life, the NBC series. I’ve enjoyed the first four episodes. In fact, episode three has one of the most brilliant sequences I’ve ever seen. Here’s the setup. Charlie Crews is a detective who was sent to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. Being a cop in prison made him a target for many many beatings.
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People go to movies, watch TV, and read novels because they enjoy having a certain type of experience. They enjoy it so much that they are willing to pay for it, again and again and again. Our job as writers is to create a narrative that evokes this desired experience in the reader. Yes, we
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After a cancerous death, I appeared on Writing Excuses this week to groan and hold forth with the guys on writing second novels and second books in a series. During the podcast I talked about my practice of debriefing after every writing project. A reader just asked what that was, and so I thought I’d explain it
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In part one, we talked about the story problem and its central role in reader suspense. We also talked about a man scratching his bum. In part two, we discussed the three character factors that are critical for reader suspsense and how they also help make a character rock. (For those of you just starting
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In the last part in this series we discussed the idea that readers don’t want your characters to be happy. They want them to hunted, stressed, threatened, freaked, and nigh unto some horrible fate for 90% of the novel. At that point, after all that trouble, readers want the characters to pull victory out of
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