CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

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,

I was recently asked whether or not it was a good idea to combine stories - in other words, to take an existing story and in some way join it with another one, rather than let it stand alone as a work in its own right. There are examples of this in the world of literature - the one that immediately comes to mind is Tolkien’s children’s tale The Hobbit , which quickly became linked with, and then very much a part of, the complete world of other stories he had been working on f

As a quick example, to show certain differences between writing styles, let’s take a look at an excerpt from Robert E. Howard’s tale of Conan the Barbarian, called 'The Thing in the Crypt', and part of The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway.   Howard’s stories of Conan belonged to the genre known as ‘Sword and Sorcery’, which pretty much describes its nature completely. These were straightforward action stories featuring simple-minded warriors battling hideous creatures, wi

How well do you know your protagonist?   If your central characters are like many, you may have developed ideas about their desires, values, beliefs, and opinions. You may have even drawn up personal codes for them that dictate to some degree whether they are being ‘good’ people. If there is any one thing you can do as a writer, surely it is to establish who your main characters are, you might think.   The truth is, although this is common practice amongst writers, most of th

I think it’s peculiar that we read books usually long before we get to know anything about their authors. Sometimes we never find out anything significant about the person behind the story. In most cases, who the author is probably has little significance in the long run to the impact of the tale itself, and the biography of the author shouldn’t be the focus of a study of the story, but it still strikes me as odd that we are quite prepared to take on board entire manuscripts