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Pick up a book that's been longlisted or shortlisted for a major literary award in 2024. (Booker, National, Giller, Toronto Book Award, Governor General, Writer's Trust, Pen America, Cudhill, Hugo, Edgar, Baillie Gifford, Griffin, Nobel, and Pulitzer to name a few). Our feature title is Richard Powers' new book, Playground Longlisted for the ...
- By Anne R. Allen
- Do Write Your First Chapter Last
- Don’T Open with Death Or Trick Your Reader with False Starts
- Do Introduce The Protagonist in The First Chapter
- Don’T Start with Dialogue, Especially Reader-Feeder
- Do Put More Than One Character in Your First Chapter
- Don’T Put in Too Many, Either: Avoid Crowds and Battles
- Do Let Us Know Where We Are
- Don’T Equate Conflict with Violence: Create Real Tension That Propels The Story
- Do Let Us Know What The Protagonist Wants
I’ve had questions from several writers recently about how to approach a first chapter. New writers hear so many rules about what they must do in the first line, first paragraph, and first chapter that they can feel paralyzed, afraid to write a word. Let’s hope that NaNoWriMois helping some of you fight that paralysis! Yes, there are a lot of rules...
Yes, you read that right. Stop agonizing, sketch out the first chapter and get on with writing your story. This is really important for NaNoWriMos. You could spend the whole month worrying that thing to death. Don’t. That’s because when you’re writing your first draft, you’re writing for you.Later, you’ll edit for your reader. That’s when “the rule...
I know the standard opening of every TV cop show involves random strangers discovering a body or getting killed. This is something that works great in drama but not in a novel. (It also provides work for a lot of new and struggling actors. 🙂 ) But whoever readers meet first in a bookis the character they’ll bond with. If that person gets killed on...
You generally want to open a novel with a scene involving the main character. And yes, your novel must have ONE main character. (Unless it’s a saga, in which case there will be a series of main characters, each with a defined story arc springing from the one before.) Readers don’t need to know a huge amount about the protagonist right away, but the...
Former agent Nathan Bransford says, “I’m not much of a fan of starting a novel off with unanchored dialogue. It’s hard to start investing before we know where we are, who the characters are, and how we should be contextualizing the conversation.” There’s also the problem that newbies tend to use dialogue for “As-you-know, Bob” passages like this: “...
We’re all tempted at some point to open with our protagonist in a car, on a plane, or trekking through the ruined countryside after a battle…and musing about stuff. She’s thinking about the dragon she just killed, or recapping the catastrophe she’s escaping from, or who she’s going to meet at Starbucks. But nothing happens on the page. There is no ...
Lots of new writers are led astray by the rule that you should start a book “in media res” (literally, “in the middle of the thing”.) And they know they need conflict. So they start the story in the middle of the battle between the Trolls and the Orcs and we see four different hand-to hand combats going on and gallons of spurting blood and we have ...
While you don’t want to give a ton of physical description, readers do need to know what planet/historical time period they’re in. In spite of everything you’ve heard about showing-not-telling, it’s perfectly all right to give the reader some basic information in a straightforward way, as Jeffrey Eugenidies does in Middlesex: “I was born twice: fir...
A lot of new writers confuse conflict with violence. That’s one of the main reasons for those opening battle scenes, deaths, and murders. But any kind of conflict can create tension. It can be as simple as two children in the back seat of a car on a road trip arguing over who saw the Idaho license plate first. And that can lead to conflict between ...
We need to know what your main character wants in the present scene, which might be for the troll who just killed his companions to stop swiping at him with that pointy sword. But we also need to know pretty early in the story what your hero really, really wants (apologies to the Spice Girls.) The reader needs to know the protagonist’s ultimate goa...
Shop local at A Novel Spot Bookshop, an Indie Bookstore in Etobicoke and find your next read.
A Novel Spot Bookshop, located inside the much adored Humbertown Shopping Center, is an independent bookstore run by book lovers for book lovers. While the e-Reader might seem handy in the hustle and bustle of the new millennium most avid book readers still prefer the touch of the real thing to the digital, present company included.
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19 hours ago · Past Canada Reads panellist and actor Kudakwashe Rutendo is fascinated by the craft behind writing fiction. As a voracious reader, she set out to curate a list of novels of writers writing about ...
Aug 6, 2022 · You can use a bookstore to find a book you’re looking for, but, in a good one, you’re likely to discover something along the way. The question, though, that hangs above Deutsch’s bookish ...
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Aug 9, 2021 · 1. A strong opening: A great book grabs readers on the first page and doesn’t let go until they’ve reached the end of the book. That’s why a strong opening is one of the most important elements of book writing. For both non-fiction and fiction writers, the opening of a book offers an opportunity to introduce your main character, highlight ...
