Advice

Think of the rose petals in American Beauty, the bird imagery in Shawshank Redemption or Leon's beloved houseplant in The Professional.These metaphors stay with us long after the movie. Like the sled in Citizen Kane, they work as visual synopses, remembered for their story content and emotional power. Often featured on movie posters, metaphors arrest us, instantly messaging a story idea in a single image.Extended metaphors, those that run alongside a character or plotline, can carry a great deal of the story load. They can enter a scene with stealth or a loud bang. They have an elasticity that allows...

In last week's installment of my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we began to discuss ways that quotation marks might be misused. In this final installment, we'll examine this issue in depth, and also look at the power of quotation marks when used in context with other punctuation. In some trendy works (and classic works, too) you'll find that authors opt not to use quotation marks at all, but rather to indicate dialogue with some other mark, such as a dash, or italics, or no mark at all (not to be confused with paraphrasing)....

The great myths and legends were not authored by individuals the way stories are today but were evolved naturally and instinctively by unconscious processes in oral traditions. Even if they started out as made-up or true stories, revelations or dreams, they still ended up for long periods of time in oral traditions and that became the principal dynamic behind their creation.The process went something like this: it began with a real or imagined incident or event that was worth repeating, something so intriguing that we were compelled to repeat it. It was passed along by word of mouth, from person...

In last week's installment of my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we discussed the power of quotation marks, their ability to accelerate the pace of a work, and to allow a break from prose. They have many additional creative uses which are often overlooked; let's examine a few of them: Quotation marks can help indicate a passage of time. Most writers just routinely use quotation marks to open and close a line of dialogue; they rarely consider the placement of the marks within a line of dialogue. For example: "I love you, don't you...

Most writers have a preference for one style of writing over another. Some writers are more adept at developing complex, interesting, and quirky characters. Others excel at page-turning action. The lucky ones are writers who are good at creating both the Character Emotional Development plotline and the Dramatic Action plotline. Become aware of your strength and learn to address your weakness, and you, too, can become one of the lucky ones.Broadly speaking, writers who prefer writing action-driven stories focus on logical thinking, rational analysis, and accuracy. Action-driven writers tend to rely more on the left side of their brain. These...