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The Seven Basic Plots

The Seven Basic Plots
According to the British journalist and author Christopher Booker, there are only seven ‘storylines’ in the world. In his book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a work that took over forty years to write, Booker surveys world literature, outlining commonalities and showing that, although there are a multitude of tales and endless variety in the telling, all narratives are really variations of the basic seven. Booker’s work is detailed, interesting, and very long—over 700 pages—but his message is simple. Rags to Riches Someone who has seemed to the world quite commonplace is shown to have been hiding a second, more exceptional self within. Although it may seem reductive to restrict all narrative to these seven basic plots, it is actually quite instructive. Today, stories in all kinds of forms are everywhere—in books and films, on the news, on TV shows, on the radio, through the internet via email, YouTube, blogs, and hyperlinks. Related:  Language

Will Self: ‘I write first thing, when I can suspend disbelief in the act of making things up’ | Books When I’m working on a novel I type the initial draft first thing in the morning. Really: first thing. For preference, I have a cigarette ready-rolled and a coffee percolator loaded the night before; then I simply roll out of bed, fuel up and set to it. I believe the dreaming and imagining faculties are closely related, such that wreathed in night-time visions I find it possible to suspend disbelief in the very act of making stuff up, which, in the cold light of day would seem utterly preposterous. I’ve always been a morning writer, and frankly I believe 99% of the difficulties novices experience are as a result of their unwillingness to do the same. Narrative structure, mise en scene, characterisation − you can’t get to grips with these problems unless you’ve put the words on the page. So, my rule is I don’t rise from my desk until I’ve done my allotted portion.

Cure writer's block with writing prompts - writing tips character name generator Jack Kerouac's Essentials of Spontaneous Prose If possible write "without consciousness" in semi-trance (as Yeats' later "trance writing") allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so "modern" language... 66 Writing Experiments 5. William S. The cutup is a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random... 5 Ways to Deal with Word Repetition Word repetition can really weigh down your writing and slow down readers. Try out these five simple ways to tackle word repetition and improve your writing skills. 1. Develop Your Ear I believe “word rep.” is the comment I write most frequently on student papers. That’s because word repetition is a telltale—maybe the telltale—sign of awkward, non-mindful writing, whether by students or anyone else. Today’s post is by Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. 2. There are some nuances to my unified theory of word repetition, which boil down to: the more common the word, the more leeway you have in repeating it, and vice versa. In the previous sentence, I repeated “to,” “word,” “more,” and “the” (twice, for a total of three times). 3. I once had a student submit something very close to the following in an assignment: “Johnson is the youngest representative in the legislature. 4. H.W. “Hartnell read the newspaper. 5.

The subtle art of translating foreign fiction | Books Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd. Some days later, in bed, I began reading it. Last week, I mentioned this experience to Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. Translation matters. Naturally, publishers and booksellers alike are keen to capitalise on our exotic new appetites (to use the phrase “cash in” seems a bit unfair in these slightly rarefied circumstances). Which brings me back to where I started. I didn’t fall in love with Korean.

Writing Exercises Meredith Sue Willis Author and Teacher More Free Writing Exercises below and here : Exercises 1- 20 Exercises 21- 40 Exercises 41 - 60 Exercises 61-80 Exercises 81-100 Exercises 101 - 120 Exercises 121 - 140 Exercises 141 - 160 Exercises 161 - 180 Exercises 181 - 200 Exercises 201 - 240 Exercises 241 - 260 Point-of-View Characters Whose Gender Is Not Yours We had a discussion in my Advanced Novel Writing Class at NYU about the difficulty of capturing a character who is of a different gender from yourself. Writing about people unlike yourself– by race, ethnic group, age, and certainly gender or sexual preference– is always a big challenge, but also of great interest to a creative writer. One class member spoke of an excellent contemporary novel written by a woman and narrated by a man. Exercise #261 All around me as I write this exercise there is great devastation from the natural—possibly human enhanced—disaster, Hurricane Sandy. Exercise #262 Exercise #263 Exercise #264 Exercise #265 Exercise #266 Exercise #267 . .

A Simple Novel Outline – 9 questions for 25 chapters « H.E. Roulo Just as every tree is different but still recognizably a tree, every story is different but contains elements that make it a story. By defining those before you begin you clarify the scope of your work, identify your themes, and create the story you meant to write. At Norwescon 2011 I sat in on a session called Outline Your Novel in 90-minutes led by Mark Teppo. Here are the 9 questions to create a novel: 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) 8.) 9.) Now, with those 9 questions answered to your satisfaction, try to fill in a 25 chapter, 75,000 word outline. Chapters 7-18 are the middle of your book. Chapters 19-25 depict the heroic act to victory. Wasn’t that easy? Okay, sure, the work isn’t done yet. Using the idea that there are 25 chapters, I outlined my current work in progress. I hope that was helpful. Tell me what works for you. Related 6 Steps to Masterful Writing Critiques June 7, 2013 In "Writing Tips" 8 Novel Editing Steps - The Basic Overview Writers love to write. December 2, 2011 In "News"

The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source Posted by Slav Petrov, Senior Staff Research Scientist At Google, we spend a lot of time thinking about how computer systems can read and understandhuman language in order to process it in intelligent ways. Today, we are excited to share the fruits of our research with the broader community by releasing SyntaxNet, an open-source neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Our release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as Parsey McParseface, an English parser that we have trained for you and that you can use to analyze English text. Parsey McParseface is built on powerful machine learning algorithms that learn to analyze the linguistic structure of language, and that can explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence. This structure encodes that Alice and Bob are nouns and saw is a verb.

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IdiomSite.com - Find out the meanings of common sayings All your questions about pronoun deletion and the inexorable death of the universe, answered. Matt Cardy/Getty Images Something has been mysteriously absent from many of my recent emails: me. Hope all is well with you, I write, conveniently erasing myself as the subject of the sentence. Agree with Bob’s critiques. Would love to read a post on this. Can do in an hour. Katy Waldman is Slate’s words correspondent. Wherefore the shyness, the equivocation? Linguists, who call the axing of pronouns from the start of a statement “conversational deletion,” classify it as an expedient form of ellipsis, or the scraping away of words that are nevertheless understood in context. With deletion, the subject of the sentence is rarely forgotten (or mistaken), just submerged. In a 2012 paper for the journal English Language and Linguistics, Andrew Weir finds that conversational deletion (he terms it “left-edge deletion”) shows up disproportionately in “certain registers of written English,” such as diaries. What’s the sum-total effect of such omissions on communication?

Descriptive Writing Prompts [Slideshow] About Descriptive Writing Prompts Descriptive writing prompts can be useful tools for overcoming writer's block or simply getting you in the habit of practicing writing on a daily basis. In descriptive writing, the goal is to make the reader feel as though he is part of the scene. Use the following selection of descriptive writing prompts to help you get started on your next writing project. Describing the Villian Imagine this person will be the villain in a short story that you are writing.

Cliche Finder Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word "cat" or "day" but haven't been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase... Over 3,300 clichés indexed! What exactly is a cliche? This is Morgan, creator of the Cliche Finder. Or, you might like my crazy passion project: Spanish for Nerds: Learning Spanish via Etymologies! Back to cliches... if you would like to see some other Web sites about clichés? © S. Special thanks to Damien LeriAnd to Mike Senter Morgan's Web page

Everyone Speaks Text Message Illustration by The Heads of State Illustration by The Heads of State How do you spell “N'Ko” in N'Ko? For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language. For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline. When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use for several years. And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers like Traore to read and write in the languages they spoke at home. At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two typewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters. Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko seemed destined to remain a code used by an elite. Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new life thanks to technology.

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