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Inevitable Narrative: How to Detect what Is Necessary in Your Fiction

December 7, 2020

Learning how to detect what is necessary in your fiction allows you to write an inevitable narrative. A narrative that is inevitable is structurally solid and leads to a sense-making ending.

Therefore, it should be fairly obvious that learning to see what’s necessary and what’s not when writing is very important. To put it simply, without having an inevitable narrative you will likely have problems with narrative pace as well as a problematic ending.

Moreover, a non inevitable narrative… inevitably creates problems with over-explaining and exposition. The reason? If something that shouldn’t be there actually is, you tend to (sometimes subconsciously) rationalize it with superfluous content.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at inevitable narratives. I’ll show you how to decide what is narratively inevitable and what isn’t, as well as how to structure your narrative in a way that precisely favors its inevitability.

inevitable narrative
An inevitable narrative helps you find the only way to a sense-making ending
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How to Gauge Your Writing Skills

November 30, 2020

Self-reflection isn’t easy, as humans have a tendency for confirmation bias. To put it bluntly, it’s easier to believe in a comforting lie than to face an ugly truth. Writers are no exception – indeed, as we’ll see, in some sense they’re particularly vulnerable to self-deception, but probably not in the way you’d expect – and as a result they struggle to gauge their writing skills.

gauge writing skills
Gauging your writing skills is about understanding the fault lines between past and present
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Literature in the Audiovisual Era

November 23, 2020

Literature in the audiovisual era. Can it survive, and how? I’m bouncing ideas off Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

Chris: The idea behind this post began as a series of what-if thoughts and musings. We were talking about a generational disconnect in terms of readers’ ability to fill in the gaps.

Igor: Younger-generation writers grew up with (anglophone) young-adult fantasy and science fiction. Literally everything is spoon-fed to them, all details, all plot points, everything. I don’t like that. I wholeheartedly believe in strategic holes and unexplainables.

Chris: Man, I write about this on the blog all the time. Off the top of my head, I’d mention my posts on over-explaining, narrative exposition, and of course the more theoretical on Keats’s negative capability.

Igor: Suggesting is much more powerful than showing, because the imagination is boundless, thus filling the vacuum with something truly intense. This is the tactic I’ve found for my literature to survive in a predominantly audiovisual era.

literature in the audiovisual era
How can literature survive in the audiovisual era, where vision & sound give the illusion of everything?
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