The first building block: structure, plot and story (part three)

Those brilliant ideas for stories that mysteriously bubble up from somewhere deep in the subconscious to wake an author in the middle of the night, and get them groping for the notebook or phone they

When you think of fantasy fiction, one of the first words that comes to mind might well be ‘epic’. The genre often features tales that are vast in scope and size, spreading across multiple volumes – w

When it comes to the first five or six pages in any book, the reader can be sure of one thing. These are the pages the writer has gone over again and again. The words you read may flow or stumble forw

AI, literary theory and traditional storytelling

Placing key elements in the centre is not always the best option and can create a lack of visual interest. A common way to organize pictorial elements is to geometrically divide the picture plane into

Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, was famously easily distracted, not to say a little work shy. He is supposed to have said, ‘I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they m