Tag: Romance

Surviving Valentine month

Mushy month is upon us!

I love sentimental stuff, and I love romance – perhaps more than most women – but there’s soon going to be a surfeit of it.

It will be all around us, all pervading, all nauseating – we may want to break free.

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Word counts that work

This week I’m going to talk about word counts and what they could mean to you as a reader and as a writer.

What word count can mean to a reader:
How long is this story? Do I really want to read such a short/long story? Some like it long – they feel cheated by shorts and novellas; others want to get through a book in one night, or on the train ride home, so they shudder at epic word counts.

For authors, though, word counts can mean two things:

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Semicolons, Em-dashes, and Ellipses

This week I’m going to talk about some interesting punctuation marks that you should certainly try in your writing.

First, I’m going to define what a clause is, because we’ll be talking about it a lot in the following section.

A clause is a group of words – it forms part of a sentence AND contains a subject and a verb.

For example: Tanay stepped into the en-suite bathroom and began to look for a shaving kit.

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Point of View in story-telling

When it refers to real life, a Point of View is the “position from which something is viewed”. In story-telling, it translates into “who is telling the story?”Whose viewpoint is it? How much of it is biased because it is only one point of view? How much can a reader believe if it is coming from one ‘position’ only?Let me try and answer these questions.

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Midpoints that impel the story onwards

This week I’m going to talk about how to write a midpoint that keeps the reader turning the pages.As the word suggests, the midpoint of a story comes right at the center of it.How should it be written?Why should we care?Regardless of what genre we write, the first quarter of the story is invariably where the characters are introduced to the reader and where the events that complicate the main characters’ lives take place.This part is the set-up to the second quarter of the story which highlights how the characters react to the life-altering events (job offer, job loss, tragedy, natural disaster, unexpected inheritance) that beset them.Their reactions drive the story forward – if they don’t react, there will be no story.

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