The Powerful Narrative

Carol and I are headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains today to present our 3-days-plus workshop, The Powerful Narrative.

Our theme is simple: whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, your goal should be a story that works. What does this look like? A reader so engaged that they keep turning those pages.

Carol and I have worked together and separately long enough to understand that books succeed almost in direct proportion to the strength of their narrative elements. Likewise, when they fail, it’s nearly always because they don’t tell stories that work.

“Books” is a broad term, but I used it intentionally, becuse the guiding principles of powerful narrative are the same for non-fiction and fictiion. In all cases, the way to capture and maintain reader interest is to invoke the strongest possible story values in three key areas:

character/characterization
plot and/or story structure
torward drive or thrust.

Meet these three challenges successfully, and you’ve got yourself a page turner.

Up here in the mountains, Internet service is spotty, but I hope to be blogging about all this in greater detail–from the workshop, as we go. Whether or not that happens, you’ll be hearing more about Powerful Narrative in the future.

Looking ahead...
In the next day or so, I’ll be posting my LONG overdue links page, and it’s going to be one of the best collections of fiction writing links on the Web. It’ll get better, too, as I add more. Collecting them has been great fun, as well as a potent reminder that this is a great time for writers–at least on the Web.

Print publication may be going through a painful transition period, but I’d say, having begun my career in the typewriter era, there’s a greater variety of concentrated thought, knowledge, and support for the novelist now than ever before existed before in any form. And much of it is only a click or two away.

And speaking of…

NaNoWriMo is almost upon us once again. Look for my 15-day NaNoWriMo Countdown to Day 1, with preparation strategies and daily tasks designed to help you hit the ground running come November 1.