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The usual way to deliver backstory is confession. A character finally sits still and tells us what happened. It works, but the reader hears the truth at the same moment the character does, and you lose the thing backstory is best at: the delay. Sharon Creech found a better vehicle, and it happens to be…

A riff is not an adaptation, and it isn’t a retelling. One book riffing on another borrows mechanics and stance, not plot. The source is a tuning fork, not a template: struck once, quietly, so the new book rings in the same key. Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog riffs on Jerome K….

Comedy dies on the page when the writer starts grinning. The narration winks, the jokes get announced. In 1889, Jerome K. Jerome published a book about three men and a dog boating up the Thames. Almost nothing happens in it. It has never been out of print. Three Men in a Boat runs on one…

The semicolon’s one earned job in fiction, why nobody speaks in semicolons, and a three-way read-aloud test for every one in your draft.

When your ending doesn’t work, the fix is usually not a new plot. It’s an earlier decision. The cleanest demonstration ever filmed is Run Lola Run. Lola has twenty minutes. Her boyfriend Manni has lost a bag of money, and if she doesn’t replace it, he will rob a store and probably die. The film…

Hollywood spent years unable to make The Princess Bride, and nobody doubted the story. Producers read William Goldman’s novel and said the same thing: great story, no handle. The book worked on the page. It refused the camera. The problem was the outer story. Goldman’s 1973 novel is wrapped in a conceit: the tale of…

Dramatic irony turns a secret the reader knows into a second current running through every scene.

In science fiction, a wholly original premise is not a gimmick. It is the engine. And there is a simple test of a great concept: how many scenes does it force that no other premise could? David Levithan’s Every Day passes the test better than almost anything on the shelf. The narrator, A, wakes each…

Craft talk sorts narrators into two bins: reliable and unreliable. Aza Holmes, the narrator of John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, fits neither. She never lies to the reader. She is simply not the one driving. Aza’s OCD runs the narration itself. An intrusive thought loops verbatim in the middle of a scene. A…

Some of the strongest suspense in fiction comes from structure, not plot. John Green’s Looking for Alaska runs two devices at once, one pointed forward and one pointed back. The forward one is the countdown. Chapter headings count down to an unnamed event. One Hundred Thirty-Six Days Before. A Hundred Days Before. The reader has…

Craft books teach two ways to hide a secret: don’t tell it, or lie about it. The Blind Assassin does a third thing. It never lies, and it tells nearly everything. The structure does the hiding. Several strands braid through the book. An old woman’s memoir of a small-town childhood and a bad marriage. A…

The backstory is the story. Atwood runs two clocks: aftermath in the present, plot in the past. The zigzag is the tension.