George Hamilton's Blog, page 7
November 6, 2011
To create natural conflict in your story, insert a major difference between your main characters
Shirley Valentine, from the Willy Russell play, is at heart adventurous and yearning for excitement in her life. This is shown best by putting her with an unadventurous husband, and it leads to conflict in their relationship because of their opposing qualities, which eventually results in Shirley going on holiday to Greece with a friend where she has a rollercoaster of a romance.
In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says that: "Conflict, tension and drama in dialogue are heightened when...
October 23, 2011
Quotes From: Secrets From The Dust
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October 7, 2011
Splitting a theme from a well-known event and using it in your story
The best themes in my view have a level of universality about them, in that they can be applied to more than one human story. If that is the case, we should be able to split off a theme from a commonly known story or event and use it in another story. I would do that where the event the theme is split from is so commonly known and current that I could not add anything to that story or event by writing about it now, but by using its theme in another story I could highlight the principle in a u...
September 20, 2011
How To Illustrate The Theme Of You Novel
September 11, 2011
Why should the reader care?
Recently, I asked a reviewer I met on KUForum if she would like to review my novel, Secrets From The Dust. She replied to say that it was not the sort of book she normally read, but she would have a look at the sample. A couple of days later she contacted me to say the sample had left her on a cliff hanger, and she needed to know what happened next. So I sent her the kindle eBook, and a few days later, she wrote a wonderful review admitting that she had been late for work because she wanted t...
August 9, 2011
Review of Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" 4/5*
The early 1960s. The civil rights movement is well underway, with marches, boycotts and sit-ins. The resistance to change is no stronger than in Jackson Mississippi, where a black man can be beaten to within inches of his life for mistakenly using the white restroom. It is here that we meet the five main characters of the novel, three young white women who live on the privileged side of the bridge, and two negroes who during the day work as servants on the white side of the bridge, but at...
July 19, 2011
July 4, 2011
Oprah encouraged me to do it!
Have you ever felt you needed to take a giant leap to change your life, but the fluttering in your stomach and the whispered doubts all around prevented you from walking to the edge of that diving board and springing off? Exhilarating, yes, but what happens if you have a crash landing? That is the position in which I found myself back in 2001, as I struggled with the decision about packing everything in to go to Australia to write Secrets From The Dust, a novel about the stolen aboriginal...
May 22, 2011
Congratulations to winners of the Goodreads Giveaway of Secrets From The Dust
Thanks to all those who took part in the giveaway.
George Hamilton
