8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101: *
1)Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2)Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3)Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4)Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5)start as close to the end as possible.
6)Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7)Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
-- 09 Dec 2014, 14:31 --
There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them