I believe Stephen King is one of the greatest writers of our time. Several of his novels, including The Stand, ‘Salem’s Lot, and Wizard and Glass, are among my all-time favorites. So, when I discovered he had written another fantasy novel titled Fairy Tale, I bought it immediately and dove right in. My review has…
Ever since I discovered the connection between Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and his Dark Tower series, I’ve always been intrigued by King’s second novel. But I never got around to buying the book until BookBub ran a featured deal this fall. I snapped it up and dove into ‘Salem’s Lot just in time for Halloween….
The Stand miniseries wrapped up last week with the series’ best episode, in my opinion. The episode was an extended epilogue written by Stephen King for the show. It ties to the book’s epilogue, but it’s really a story about Fran Goldsmith and how she finally had to make a stand. I only wish the…
When the lockdown began in March and coronavirus coverage dominated the news, I felt oddly compelled to re-read one of several novels about a pandemic. I pulled two books off my shelf: The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton and The Stand by Stephen King. I chose The Stand, and it reminded me why I’ve long…
I don’t often blog about the craft of writing, but I do love a good story. Good stories tend to have good plots, which usually means they’re well-structured. This week, I’m blogging a bit about story structure . . . and Harry Potter. Why, you ask? Let’s just say it all began with a wager….
Last week, I mentioned how my upcoming novel, Enoch’s Device, was a bit of a journey tale. This was a reference to a series of posts I wrote on Long Journeys about a year ago, during a time when I was travelling constantly, with little time to write. A year later, I find myself in…
In the final installment in my series on the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, I’m focusing on Grand Events – those major conflicts that makes a great epic so breathtaking. Grand events are critical because they are a primary vehicle through which the author shows how huge the stakes are in the story. They…
Every story needs a protagonist, and often he or she possesses qualities that could be described as “heroic.” A great epic, however, needs a hero in the truest sense of the word. Just look at three of the first four definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to see what I mean: Definition of HERO a mythological…
Great epics are never about a single character’s journey. Even if the stakes are enormous for that one character, rarely would such a story be described as epic. In great epics, many characters must be in peril, and sometimes the fate of whole nations, or even whole worlds, are at issue in the story. The…
Great epics often span considerable time periods. That’s one of the reason these novels tend to look like small telephone books in hard copy. These aren’t 90,000 word novels like so many popular thrillers, which move at break-neck speed and sometimes account for a mere 24 hours (or less) of story time. No, epics are…
For this week’s “beginning,” I’m going back to one of the great journey tales by Stephen King, his second book in The Dark Tower series: The Drawing of the Three. Here’s how it begins, after this image of the book’s cover: The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a…