My purpose here is to isolate the tools. When the masters talk about their tools, they often offer a lot of leadup, lots of reasons why you should want to learn the tool, lots of reasons why not using the tool will kill your story or its chances of success. All this leadup is important, especially if you’re newer to writing and haven’t ever before considered these points. I’ve included links to the authors’ pages and to the books’ pages for anyone who wants a fuller picture… and I encourage everyone to seek the fuller picture.
But the fuller picture is not what we’re doing here.
Here, I intend to pluck out the nitty gritty of each master’s definition of a given tool and then synthesize the various definitions into a single, top-of-the-line tool.
We’re just considering the tools. Just their definitions. And then, with that done, we’ll look at how the master novelists (and we) use the tools to tell stories.
I hope you’re still with me.
Writes With Tools 