Once upon a time, I couldn’t write a 2,000 word piece of fiction if my life depended on it. 100,000 words, sure. 50,000 words, fine. 10...

Yesterday I finally finished Story by Robert McKee. It’s an excellent writing resource, one I would recommend to anyone interested in...

A well-written opening reflects the kind of story you’ve written. If it’s a horror then the opening should communicate this; similarl...

The other day I started reading “Moonwalking With Einstein” by Joshua Foer. Among other things, Foer talks about the art of memory and h...

Humorous Openings I think that comedy and drama go hand in hand and, clearly, I’m not the only one. (BTW, this post is part of ...

The Character Opening The character story opening is my favorite kind of opening, though it’s arguably the trickiest to pull ...

I’m going to take a break from my series on story openings (I’ll come back to that on Wednesday) to look at what Ferdinando Buscema c...

On the 31st I began a series on Story Openings and claimed—boldly—that there were six. Well, more or less six; I suppose it depends on ...

I’ve always been in love with the idea of re-imagining one of the fairytales I adored as a child, telling it again in a way that preser...

It seems to me that there are six general ways to open a story. The first way, as I discussed last week, is with description . The sec...