David Corbett’s “The Art of Character”: The 5 Cornerstones of Characterization
David Corbett—New York Times Notable author of many novels including Blood of Paradise (2007), Do They Know I’m running (2010), and The Mercy of the Night (2015)—published a sparkling, extremely-helpful nonfiction writers’ guide in 2013 entitled, “The Art of Character.” In this book, he touches on many aspects of fine, intelligent, deep, 3-D characterization not only for writing books—literature—but for other mediums, thus the subtitle of the work: “Creating Memorable Charact
The “Bread and Meat” of Writing
It has taken me years and years of writing my own novels, stories and nonfiction, not to mention editing countless others’ manuscripts, to finally over time realize that there is such a thing as bread and meat in writing. What the hell am I talking about? Simple. I am constantly telling my book clients to work on SCENE versus summary, back story, explanation. Basically the old Tried and True: Show don’t tell. Of course your novel needs some back story, to explain what happene
HANDLING LITERARY REJECTION
First off, I want to apologize for the lengthy 3-month delay in blog post material, and to say hello once again after such a pause. I was traveling Europe and ended up hiking the majority of the 500-mile Camino de Santiago (“The Way of Saint James”) spiritual pilgrimage in Northern Spain. It took me 29 days. Ever see the film, “The Way,” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez (2010)? That’s what I did. No doubt I will have many more stories now to tell. And not enough time to w
