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Guest Blog: Alma Alexander
Jul. 18th, 2011 10:49 amToday we welcome Alma Alexander (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anghara) to the blog! She has a new book getting ready to hit the shelves, Midnight at Spanish Gardens, and she'd like to talk about some of the ideas behind the novel, mostly dealing with "crossroads," all of those paths we could have taken when we made those hard decisions (or even the light ones) in our lives. So please welcome, Alma! And use the links at the end of the post to find out more about her and her books.
Alma:
There have been many attempts to boil down the craft of writing, the act of telling a story to an audience, to a nice sound bite which hopefully encapsulates the whole messy thing into a sentence or two and lets curious “outsiders” into the secrets of the creative world. It’s what lies behind all those “there are only [27 or 18 or 7 or 3 or 1] basic plot(s)” kind of statements. And yes, it is perfectly possible to boil down even the most exciting book into a plot bunny of a few pithy words – and the information you are presented with would be completely correct, and completely useless, completely bloodless. Because the story lies in the telling, in the end. Not in what PRECISELY is told.
I’m not going to wade into the argument of how many plots there are in the universe, but let’s face it, when you cut away all the flesh and flense down to the bare bones there really are only a few basic skeletons on which you can build. What I am going to do, here, today, is focus on one aspect of telling a tale, one single strand of plot, if you like. And that would be that every tale told involves, at its core, a journey.
( READ MORE! )
anghara) to the blog! She has a new book getting ready to hit the shelves, Midnight at Spanish Gardens, and she'd like to talk about some of the ideas behind the novel, mostly dealing with "crossroads," all of those paths we could have taken when we made those hard decisions (or even the light ones) in our lives. So please welcome, Alma! And use the links at the end of the post to find out more about her and her books.Alma:
There have been many attempts to boil down the craft of writing, the act of telling a story to an audience, to a nice sound bite which hopefully encapsulates the whole messy thing into a sentence or two and lets curious “outsiders” into the secrets of the creative world. It’s what lies behind all those “there are only [27 or 18 or 7 or 3 or 1] basic plot(s)” kind of statements. And yes, it is perfectly possible to boil down even the most exciting book into a plot bunny of a few pithy words – and the information you are presented with would be completely correct, and completely useless, completely bloodless. Because the story lies in the telling, in the end. Not in what PRECISELY is told.
I’m not going to wade into the argument of how many plots there are in the universe, but let’s face it, when you cut away all the flesh and flense down to the bare bones there really are only a few basic skeletons on which you can build. What I am going to do, here, today, is focus on one aspect of telling a tale, one single strand of plot, if you like. And that would be that every tale told involves, at its core, a journey.
( READ MORE! )
