Tag: literary

7 Deadly Sins of Prologues–Great Novel Beginnings Part 2

To prologue or not to prologue? That is the question. This is our second installation discussing novel beginnings…get it? Novel beginnings. Okay, I’ll stop. The problem with the prologue is it has kind of gotten a bad rap over the years, especially with agents. They generally hate them. Why? In my opinion, it is because far …

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The Secret to Story Magic

Most of the time when I hear a new writer announce that his piece is “literary fiction,” that is a short-hand cue for me to expect no structure, lots of similes, metaphors, self-indulgent flashbacks and no overall conflict other than a main character’s really pretentious angst. Most of the time, it smacks of self-therapy thinly guised as a story