Now in audio!
I’ve published a new Fundamental Fridays article on the Story Grid blog. It’s called Thawing the Fiction Freeze, and is aimed at competent nonfiction writers who freeze up in the face of fiction. These are the writers whose prose tends to turn purple as soon as they begin writing a story. Or they’re the writers whose story-mind is filmmaker’s mind, where only the bare beats and some dialogue occur to them and they don’t know how to add narrative flesh to the bones.
Capable, professional writers of nonfiction often report freezing up when they set out to write a novel. Faced with the blank screen and the new task of creating fiction, they seem to lose all their linguistic ease and fluency.
Is this you? Did you feel like you were back at square one when you decided to try your hand at story writing? Did you wonder how all your years of expert wordsmithing could just desert you like this?
Were you excited to discover that fictional stories have a rational, replicable structure just like your nonfiction writing, only to sense a yawning abyss between your outline and a fully fleshed-out, well-written story?
It turns out there’s a bridge across that abyss. It runs directly from good story structure—genre, values, controlling idea—all the way to selection of details and choice of words at the line level. It’s a little hard to find. In this post, I’m going to point you to it and get you started across it.
Thawing the Fiction Freeze
I hope you’ll give it a look. Or a listen!