Posts tagged as:

plot

A Night at the Opera

November 23, 2010

Up until now I’ve avoided opera—not out of malice or a disdain for the music (my dad had a large collection of classical LPs he used to play when I was a kid which included a number of opera scores, and I remember enjoying them), but simply because I didn’t feel qualified to give an intelligent [...]

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Is a Good Mystery Hard to Find? Part II: The Lehane Addiction

August 6, 2010

Cover of Shutter Island: A Novel One of our blog readers made an excellent point in response to Part I of this series of blog posts (Thank you Katie!). She stated that most mysteries are more plot-driven than character-driven. This explains why in some mystery novels, the characters seem a little flat. Luckily, I believe [...]

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Spoiler Alert: My thoughts on spoilers inside!

April 23, 2010

Image by dstrelau via Flickr I don’t think spoilers are that big of a deal.  I just ruined the end of this post for you, but I hope you keep reading. I understand why they bother a lot of people – they want to be surprised by the twists and turns of a movie when [...]

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Shock & Awe: Surprise Endings

September 28, 2009

I recently read a short story where out of the blue and with no warning, the main character dropped dead, stopping the story cold.  Though it was intended to be a surprise ending with an ironic, poignant twist, it felt more like a cheap shot — plain old shock value for shock’s sake. The problem [...]

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What’s your story about?

September 1, 2009

I realized I was becoming a big(ger) writing geek when someone asked me “what’s your screenplay about”, and without thinking I replied “Do you mean what’s the story, or what’s it about?” Of course he meant what is the story, but it made me realize how much I can get my head wrapped around this [...]

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