CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Just as Tolkien used the entire mythos of Middle-earth to assist him in processing what he had witnessed in the First World War and in his life overall, many writers use their writing as a kind of therapy or way of addressing deep, partly-glimpsed concerns about the world. I’m not suggesting that anyone’s writing is necessarily a form of psychoanalysis. My own view is that, as well as an ‘unconscious mind’, we have a higher level of mental function which I’ll term a ‘super-

Horror stories belong in the Irony quadrant of my genre circle, as outlined in my book How Stories Really Work . Irony - and its subset horror - draw their power from two main sources: 1. The expectations arising from the conventional tropes of the Epic genre, in which events are presented as real and external and the subjective state of the characters (and thus of the audience) is less a focus than the outward action and movement of the story. Epics place a great emphasi

I recently had a writer contact me to ask about his use of elves in various stories that he was working on. He was wondering in particular about the ‘trope’ of ‘elves’ and whether or not readers were tired of them; he also had questions about whether to combine characters from various stories into one. This is more or less what I wrote in reply: It might help to step back from the tropes and conventions and ask ‘What exactly am I trying to accomplish with this thing called

Marketing is an area of being a writer which has never been fully cracked by many. Traditional publishing usually took on this role, and in fact marketing was largely why they thrived. But with the arrival of the Golden Age of Independent Publishing, writers found themselves having to market their own work once it was done. And many, many writers struggle terribly with it. What eludes them is that marketing is actually part of what they are doing as a writer. They are takin

Having established who you really are, what you are really interested in, and what a group of people like that might look like in Part One, let’s take a look at how to get in touch with them. The answer is literally staring you in the face. Hold your own life up to the mirror. Where are you right now? Where would you like to be? Where do you hang out whenever you can? Look at your own weekly, monthly and yearly timetables and calendars. What do you do during the week th

There’s probably least one person in the world who would give you one hundred thousand pounds as a gift if they had it. Or at least you can imagine that there might be. They would be your biggest fan. And then there are people who have never heard of you and who wouldn’t dream of giving you any money, even if you offered them something valuable in exchange. In between, there is a whole spectrum of different groups, one of which has been described in marketing as your ‘tri

I wanted to give you an instance of how to use the same principles that work in story telling to acquire some success in marketing. To do this, I’m going to use a very personal and small scale example. I wrote a book over two years, ( How Stories Really Work ) based on 40 years of study of fiction and its patterns, and promoted this on the net as much as I could, to almost zero response. The few people who did read it raved about it and wrote five star testimonials. So some

It’s probably true to say that within every successful story is a progression from Light to Dark. Most stories (Comedies and Epics or adventure stories) then have what Tolkien called a ‘eucatastrophe’ at the end in which the darkness is turned into light, but some (Tragedies and Ironies) leave readers in that darkness, for them to make of it what they will. In an earlier article, I looked at a story through the analogy of a ball being thrown across a space from writer to re

Would you like some quick, simple tips on how to build a convincing and attractive character arc for a story you are perhaps writing or have in mind? In an earlier article, I looked at how to develop a powerful plot in four steps. In brief, this was a matter of coming up with some kind of disastrous final event, which would form the climax of your story, then inventing another event of about half the magnitude of the first designed to take place in the middle of your story,