“1. Try to pick the most intriguing place in your piece to begin. 2. Try to create attention-grabbing images of a setting if that’s where you want to begin. 3. Raise the reader’s curiosity about what is happening or is going to happen in an action scene. 4. Describe a character so compellingly that we want to learn more about what happens to him or her. 5. Present a situation so vital to our protagonist that we must read on. 6. And most important, no matter what method you choose, start with something happening! (And not with ruminations. A character sitting in a cave or in jail or in a kitchen or in a car ruminating about the meaning of life and how he got to this point does not constitute something happening.)”
—Barnaby Conrad. (via)
“The last time Barnaby Conrad saw Sinclair Lewis, three years after he served as Lewis’s personal secretary, they were at a bar in Paris and, by Mr. Conrad’s account, Lewis was thoroughly drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t chastise his former secretary for failing to execute a book idea that Lewis had handed him one morning at breakfast: a novel based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating Lincoln and had embarked on a secret life in the American frontier.”
—Barnaby Conrad Revisits John Wilkes Booth - NYTimes.com. Intriguing!
Advice from Snoopy
Maria Popova presents 6 Rules for a Great Story from Barnaby Conrad and Snoopy.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/12/snoopy-barnaby-conrad-rules-for-stories/
Do you have an urge to write fiction?
Barnaby Conrad
theparisreview.orgA really interesting article about a really interesting and influential writer who remains largely obscure.
