By Tom Monteleone
The write stuff for telling an exceptional story...includes specific interviews with manhattan instances bestselling authors! Novelist and editor Tom Monteleone stocks his insights concerning the writing process-from constructing a method via developing plausible characters and settings, to the ultimate enhancing and rewriting chores. € beneficial properties never-before-published interviews with such bestselling authors as Janet Evanovich, Peter Straub, Richard Matheson, Whitley Streiber, Stephen Hunter, and William Peter Blatty € contains chapters at the publishing enterprise € writer has greater than 20 released novels less than his belt € Over 8,500 first novels have been released final 12 months by myself
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Example text
I liked to draw pictures, but they were not like the other kids’. I would draw a series of pictures all on the same subject or scene. After a typical session with the crayon box, I would have a stack of papers that told simple stories: of battles across the sky, landscapes in which armies and planes would progressively get knocked around, and monsters from dark forests would wade into towns and cities to spread their mayhem. The interesting thing is that, even at the age of six or seven, I was doing what the Hollywooders call story-boarding, which means mapping out your story in visual blocks … almost like a cartoon.
It works something like this: You’re writing your novel and you’re having problems figuring out a plot complication or how to explain a character’s motivation for doing something you just made him do. You have a problem, and you have no clue how to solve it, explain it, or fix it. So what do you do? If you’re stalled, sometimes the best thing to do is drop it for a day or so. Leave it alone and work on something else: some other scene, a new chapter, maybe even an idea for a short story. The cool thing is this—even though you don’t think you’re working on solving your creativity problem, believe me, you are.
I had become addicted to comic books early on, and the first stories I wrote were basically just rip-offs of what I’d seen in a particular comic and couldn’t get out of my head. That was just fine; at least I was writing. When I was in the Cub Scouts, I was always the one to come up with a ghost story when it was time to sit around the campfire. I was the one who had to make up a name for our team, club, pets, secret hideout, or even the games we would invent in that wonderfully free-form way kids have a talent for.