Welcome to episode 169 of the Creative Writer’s Toolbelt. In the next few episodes, I am going to be exploring the fundamentals of story structure. We’re going to look at different perspectives on story and story structure with the help of a number of guests and I am looking forward to hearing what they have to say and sharing those insights with you.
By way of an introduction, in this episode I want to ask a deceptively simple question, and it’s this: what does a really good story look like? And I am going to try to answer this question by first exploring what I mean by the word “story” and then looking at what the content of a good story should be, and what structures we could use to present that story in the best possible way.
How to use a small number of very specific descriptive cues to show your reader both scene and character ...
You know that feeling, you are about 20k to 30k words in to the story, and you suddenly begin to wonder where it's all going. Is this story really any good? Is it even worth you finishing it? These are all classic symptoms of the mid-story crisis, and in this episode we explore what that crisis is, and how you can resolve it. ...
For the fiftieth episode I'm delighted to present an interview with Nebula and Hugo award winning author Nancy Kress. Nancy is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for PROBABILITY SPACE). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In 1998, Nancy married fellow SF writer Charles Sheffield, who died in 2002 of brain cancer. In 2011 she married writer Jack Skillingstead. They live in Seattle with Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle. ...
