Category: narration
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The literary device that is your best bet to craft either COMEDY or SUSPENSE
You wouldn’t think there’s a tool in the writer’s handbook to help you to create either comedy or suspense. After all, laughter and fear are on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Yet, it’s true: there is a literary device that is a surefire way to lighten the tone with some great, unique comedy (just…
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Why I don’t like first person narration in fiction
First person seems to be ALL the rage these days. It almost feels like the default narration style for everything. Before I go into why I personally don’t like first person narration, I want to lay down a couple of caveats: That said, why do I not like first person? I think it comes down…
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What the graveyard scene in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” taught me about high stakes action scenes
The graveyard scene at the end of the fourth Harry Potter book is one of my favorite scenes in the entire series. I cannot describe how gripped I was, reading it for the first time at the age of fifteen. I had never read or experienced anything quite like that in fiction. It was amazing.…
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My funny prof, first day of class antics, and what he taught me about narration
My last semester as a grad student at the University of Alabama, I took a narratology class. I was technically studying Spanish lit, but I had ONE elective outside the Spanish dept, I was writing my own fiction–I had always wanted to be a writer–and writing was my passion. I figured narratology would be a…
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Respecting your readers means respecting the characters they care about
(Cue Aretha, right? It’s all about that R-E-S-P-E-C-T!) It is easy enough to SAY that as fiction writers, we need to respect and acknowledge the attachments readers will form to our characters. It’s easy enough to SAY that we should acknowledge the reality that readers will like or admire this character but dislike that one.…
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Thoughts on “in media res” (and how “The Crimson League: The Fight for Hope” began)
I remember learning the term “in media res” in middle school, when we were learning about Homer, “The Iliad,” and “The Odyssey.” The teacher told us that “in media res” in a narrative technique in which a story starts in the middle of the action. I was much older when I started studying Latin and…
Creative Writing with the Crimson League 