As…as Comparisons One of the ways that English has to describe things is with comparisons using as…as, as in “as big as a house”. It is similar to metaphorical language because we can describe unknown or alien things by comparing them to known things. English has a huge number of set examples of these. For…
Category: Writing
Writing Corner: Flashbacks
Flashbacks Today we’re going to look at the idea of a story-inside-a-story. This is when the main story stops to tell a second story. The most common form of this is a flashback, which is why I used it for the title of the post. There are other types of stories-inside-a-story as well. Today we…
Writing Corner: Story Arcs – The End
Story Arcs: The End In the previous Writing Corner post, we looked at the ending part of the story arc. This is usually the shortest and least important part of the story arc. However, it is still important since this is the last thing the reader will read. Last week, I mentioned the idea of…
Writing Corner: Story Arcs – The Middle
Story Arcs: The Middle In the last Writing Corner post, we looked at the beginning part of the story arc, where we are introduced to the setting, main characters and the story leads up to the event where the main conflict begins. Every story is different, so it is hard to generalize, but that is…
Writing Corner: Story Arcs – The Beginning
Story Arcs Most novels you read will have three parts: the beginning, middle, and end. Shorter stories have this too, but of course they are much shorter (no kidding). Each part of the story has a specific job and the level of action and tension is different in each part. This change in level is…
Writing Corner: Getting Story Ideas
Getting Story Ideas Have you ever wanted to write a story but you can’t think of a good idea? Everything you think of sounds like something you’ve written before or just sounds stupid. What do you do? Everyone has their own techniques, I’m sure, but I’m going to share a few of the ideas I…
Writing Corner: Types of Fiction
Types of Fiction A while back, I did a post on genre, which is a way of classifying stories by their subject. Today I’m going to look at types of fiction based on their length. When we talk about books, we often talk about the number of pages. However, the number of pages in a…
Writing Corner: Personification
Personification The word “personification” means, literally, “to make into a person. This is when we describe non-living things with human description. For example: The trees moaned in the wind, reaching out blind fingers to caress us as we walked by. Trees can’t really moan, of course, since they don’t have mouths. We are saying that…
Writing Corner: Fourth Wall Breaks
Fourth Wall Breaks A fourth wall break: when the line between the story world and the real world becomes blurred. What is the Fourth Wall? The fourth wall is a term from plays, TV shows or movies. Imagine if you are looking at a room in a TV show. You can see up to three…
Writing Corner: The Hyphen
The Hyphen I mentioned hyphens briefly in my post on the dash, but I am going to look at them a little more here, especially in a unique way they can be used in fiction. A hyphen is the shortest of all the lines used in punctuation. It is used when two or more words…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 