With Extended Dialogue (or in a car) “What do you mean you’re not going to do a blog post about not starting your novel in a car?” “Well, it’s just that we’ve already attacked airports and that’s led people to anticipate further attacks on modes of transport. Also to be honest I think the opening-in-a-car…
Tag: vicki
11 Ways Not To Start Your Novel – No. 9
With Too Much Exposition Compare and contrast the following two potential openings to my pretend debut novel: They were going to catch her. When she first started running Lauren had felt sure she’d make it. After all, who would have thought they’d be faster than her? But they were, and now each time she looked…
11 Ways Not To Start Your Novel – No. 8
In An Airport Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love- Oh no wait. That’s the opening…
11 Ways Not To Start Your Novel – No. 7
With Something Aimed Primarily to Shock It’s not uncommon for an, “ew,” to interrupt the everyday workings of the Darley Anderson Agency. It’s not even unheard of for one of our readers to be heard exclaiming, “that word again,” when first opening a submission. You know the one I’m talking about. And believe me, none…
11 Ways Not To Start Your Novel – No. 6
With Your Protagonist Waking Up The submission sits in front of me on the desk. I’ve read this scene about a hundred times before and here it is again. I’ll probably read it at least three more times before the day is up. The words spin in front of me and I search for the…
11 Ways Not To Start Your Novel – No. 5
By Summarising A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (May 25th 1977 and this one, to be precise) George Lucas used a (by no means new) technique called an opening crawl at the start of a little space movie he’d been working on. In this opening crawl he summarised all the basic…
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