How to Get Published

A Rerun

By Al Kalar

Three hints for making a speech:
Be sincere.
Be brief.
Be seated.

The battle is over and the dust is settling. The girl says, “yes”. The bad guy is busted by the cops. The rescuers break through to the survivors. The scam succeeds. So, now what happens?

If it happened to me, I’d be talking about it to anyone who’d listen for the next couple of years. I’d bore them to death.

Don’t. (more…)

A Rerun

By Al Kalar

Make your characters grow

The arc, or climax, in a story is the place where most of your accumulated problems come together. It’s the rescue, the big battle, the proposal where the girl says “yes”, landing the big job, getting away with the heist or getting caught. It’s usually the most dramatic scene (with the possible exception of the start) in the book.

For a non-fiction work, it may be where you tie all your lines of logic together, the proposal, or exposition of the consequences of what happened before in a history work. It’s the point towards which you were going with the front portion of your book. (more…)

The story…must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person. - Maxwell Anderson

by Al Philipson

by LuMaxArt

For a story to be interesting, there must be conflict. If your goal is to describe some utopian society filled with all sorts of technological wonders, you don’t have a story, just a boring travelogue.  How interesting would Beowulf have been without Grendel, his mother, and the dragon?

Ben Bova once described “a story” as “a narrative description of a character struggling to solve a problem.”

So, what do you need to do to provide the problem or “conflict”? (more…)