First person point of view remains one of the trickiest strategies for any writer, as well as one of the most effective and popular ways of telling a story. This class will provide key insights into writing in first person: …
The Self as Character: Writing in First Person Point of View Read More »
SCENIC LEADS These leads attempt to grab the reader through use of graphic detail and gripping suspenseful storytelling. These leads do not attempt to tell a complete story as do anecdotal leads, but they give the most appealing, eccentric or …
Scenic Leads the Key to Suspenseful Storytelling Read More »
ANECDOTAL LEADS Anecdotal leads tell a compelling story quickly and succinctly, a story which illustrates the larger point that the piece is making. These leads do not employ a lot of scenic detail, but instead rely on describing an action …
Anecdotal Leads: Tell a Compelling Story Quickly Read More »
“The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.” Barney Kilgore, former editor of the Wall Street Journal. The opening is the most important part of the story. If your lead is not interesting, …
Red Mountain rises above the low, brown sagebrush country outside of Benton City, Washington. Located northwest of the Tri-Cities, Washington’s smallest and most prestigious American Viticulture Area (AVA) looks more like a hill than a mountain, one of a series …
JIM HOLMES’ CIEL DU CHEVAL DEFINES THE EXCELLENCE OF RED MOUNTAIN Read More »
Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a nam
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
