CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Do you think that authors push readers through their stories? Or pull them?   You probably have not thought about your progress through a story in these terms at all. For readers, the sensation is that they themselves are in control of whether they read or not. A reader picks up a book, reads a page or more, then puts it down - everything is reader-controlled, surely?   Except that it isn’t.   Truly powerful fiction uses mechanisms which are hidden just out of sight in storie

I’ve written in earlier articles about the power that is at work in stories which both attracts readers and keeps them glued to the page or screen or stage. If a story lacks this power in any degree, a story fails to that exact amount; but add even a small part of one of the components of that power and attention is caught, engagement occurs, forward motion begins. The only works of fiction that survive for any length of time are those which contain a high enough amount of th

Of course we already know what a ‘protagonist’ is, don’t we? And an antagonist. They are the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ of fiction.   Whether they appear on stage or in films or between the pages of novels, protagonists and antagonists are pretty universal. In some stories they are obvious - the hero wears a white hat, the villain a black one - and the story is a ‘shoot-out’ of one kind or another between them. In other stories, the distinction is less clear: in a tragedy, fo

You have a few images come into your head.   With them, are some emotions or passions, connected to the images in ways that you don’t quite understand.   The combination is intoxicating, powerful enough to move you into a writing chair (sometimes) and to get you to try to capture what’s going on in your head as much as you can.   After a relatively short while, even if you feel confident enough with the language to get something down on the page or screen, you run out of ener

Putting aside for the moment the world of films and television, in which characters appear to us ‘ready made’ in the form of actors, have you ever noticed how, in most fiction, these people are rarely described in any detail by the author?   Take a look at some of the leading characters in fiction: Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice , Pip in Great Expectations, Scout in  To Kill a Mockingbird , Frodo in The Lord of the Rings , and many more, get nothing more than a me

What is it exactly that attracts readers?   Well-developed characters? An exciting plot? A thoroughly imagined world? Maybe - but when you really look at these things, they don’t answer the question. What do we mean by ‘well-developed’? How precisely is something made ‘exciting’? What’s the difference between ‘thoroughly imagined’ and just ‘imagined’?   To really understand how to attract readers, we have to understand what  is being attracted and how  that is being done.   T

Writing can be an addiction.   Many writers yearn for, hunger for, thirst for the time when they can sit down and write, in the same way that others might crave the release that they find from a drug. This isn’t so much an escape from the grim reality surrounding them (though that enters into it too) but a desire for a particular state which writing can bring on.   How to describe that state? It’s a kind of dream, a sort of reverie or trance, in which the commonplace, hard, p

I went through a phase in trying to market my books and services where I thought I was invisible.   In attempting to get my material known to a wider public, I was using social media in what I thought was a sensible way to contact people who undoubtedly needed what I had to offer - all I needed to do, I thought, was to place a reasonable ad in front of a few thousand people and they would immediately click on the ad and be taken through to my website. Not all of them would bu