CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

I was once fortunate enough to speak with Monty Roberts at one of his shows in the 1990s. Roberts is an American horse trainer who promotes his techniques of natural horsemanship through his Join-Up International organisation, believing that horses use a non-verbal language, which he terms ‘Equus’. Roberts' original best-seller, The Man Who Listens to Horses , (prompted, it is claimed by Queen Elizabeth after she had seen his horse training methods) marked the beginning of in

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird  is a good example of how a narrative can be structured so that the reader can be both drawn into the story by a vulnerable character and yet guided through it by a narrator. Lee paints Scout as a naive and innocent young girl who at the beginning of the novel is just beginning school. Scout’s encounter with racism and brutality is told to us through the older and wiser Scout, the narrating voice who can interject at times to point the way o

After the blurb comes the pitch.   The ‘pitch’ is a fuller synopsis of your story. You’ll need this to talk to agents or publishers. You’ll need it to talk to yourself when you lose track of what you’re doing.   The pitch isn’t aimed at readers, particularly.   To put together a good pitch you need to understand at least some of the elements of the craft of writing. There are plenty of guides out there about how to write a pitch, and several of them use the terminology common

It’s hard to remember now what life was like fifty or so years ago: no computers (except for vast, bulky machines locked in vaults, with lights blinking and wheels whirring), no mobile phones (not even the brick-like, hand-wound things that came out a decade or so later), and of course no internet or social media. Messages had to be written out by hand; televisions had to be switched on and off using buttons and dials on the set itself; telephones belonged in kiosks placed ar

To sell your books, you need to make maximum use of the idea of incompleteness .   Firstly, you need to reduce your story or novel down to one sentence.   Try to craft a sentence which contains a contrast between a settled, ordered state and a messy, disordered alternative. You need to begin with familiarity and then swiftly introduce obstacles or threats to that familiarity.   A very basic one sentence pitch is:   ‘When a big threat of incompleteness happens to a particular

Marketing based on shouting is operating on the principle that success is based on the number of people who hear you.   It’s also based on the idea that, if you shout loudly enough, people will stop what they are doing and ‘obey’ you.   You can probably see how this could be called ‘force marketing’: the concept that, given enough energy and volume, a message can overwhelm the listener and compel him or her to do as the message suggests - a kind of mass hypnosis, in other wor

From earlier articles, you’re probably starting to get the idea of concentrated incompleteness .   In my book How Stories Really Work  I use the term ‘vacuum’ to describe this, as it implies a mental and emotional pulling power like that of a real, physical vacuum.   Incompleteness on whatever level and in whatever field creates in us the need or tendency or desire to have completeness . You can immediately see a thousand examples in fiction, and, as I have said, incompletene

In an earlier article, we learned that Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik discovered the Zeigarnik effect by studying memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   We learned that, related to this, if you want your reader to be attracted to a character in your fiction, you want that character’s life to be full of holes, gaps, threats, missing people or things. Characters, to be attractive, need to be inc

Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist who discovered the Zeigarnik effect after a study she completed in the 1920s in which she compared memory in relation to incomplete and complete tasks. Incomplete tasks, she found, are easier to remember than successful ones.   What has this got to do with marketing?   Almost everything.   It also has quite a bit to do with writing stories.   What are you doing when you create an effective character in fictio