Category: Change
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The F Words: Circular Ending
Generally a work of fiction has one of two kinds of endings: circular or linear. You can think of a circular ending as one in which the hero returns home: back to where he started from. You can think of a linear ending as one in which the story conflicts come to a climax and…
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The F Words: Thinking of F Words
In an earlier blog, The F Words: A Writing Coach, I mentioned that Esther Hershenhorn (the writing coach!) gave me a list of six “threads” to follow throughout my novel, making certain that I didn’t drop any of those threads for too long. One of those six threads was “Cole thinking about F words.” As…
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The F Words: Poetry and the Middle
In my previous blog I mentioned that in writing The F Words based on the advice in Write Your Novel from the Middle, by James Scott Bell, I reaped not only the benefit of writing a book more easily and more quickly, but also the benefit of improving one of my thematic elements precisely because…
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The F Words: Inciting Incident
In fiction the main character experiences an “inciting incident.” The inciting incident is an event — not just any event, but one that propels the main character into the actions that will constitute the story. To state it another way, the inciting incident (which need not be the first event in the book) triggers the…
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Rising Action
In fiction rising action need not be action itself, and that’s because the term “rising action” includes not only character actions, but also character decisions, as well as events within the setting or plot (an economic depression, for example, or an earthquake). Taken together, all these incidents help build interest, suspense, and tension — and…
Barbara Gregorich 