Handling the story structure is essential, she says. It also doesn’t have to point toward the future it can also look backward toward a lost past.” This internal change is very common in fiction, Johns explains, when a character finds herself shifting “often to a place that is very different than the one she’s in at the beginning.”īut how do you make this yearning come alive and give it the emphasis it deserves? Johns recommends going for in-depth, concrete character development: “It takes a deepening of perspective and an attention to sense detail to really bring it to life and let the reader feel the character’s longing. That said, while Dorothy opens the movie yearning to go “over the rainbow,” she ultimately realizes “there’s no place like home” and desperately wishes to return to Kansas. In Johns’ creative writing classes at DePaul University, she reminds her students of The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy’s inner yearnings are revealed in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The song is an example of a heroine’s “deepest struggle, usually the question of what kind of future she imagines for herself and where that imagining might take her,” says Johns. You sure could use a strategy or two, something that makes your fiction live and breathe. Your story or novel is just not working out – the characters are flat, the scenes are flat, and the plot is going nowhere. You give it your all, but your brain freezes. Writing can be a real bloodletting at times. To do so with multiple characters inside a unified plot calls for even greater artistic skill. you’re like most fiction writers, you must surely agree with Hemingway. To weave the many intricate threads of character into a unified whole takes great artistic skill. You sure could use a strategy or two, something that makes your fiction live and breathe.īut writing fiction is a complex act. If you’re like most fiction writers, you must surely agree with Hemingway. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” -Ernest Hemingway
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