https://www.bookswelove.com/search?q=Paul%20Grant
Brevity
“I just leave out the stuff people don’t read.”
That was Elmore
Leonard’s response when I asked him how he keeps his stories moving and his
dialogue crackling. Leonard is a master of brevity, which is why
his material is so well-suited to be filmed.
The TV series Justified is based on his short story Fire In
The Hole. His crime novel Get
Shorty was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring John Travolta and Gene
Hackman. And one of his five western
novels, 3:10 To Yuma, was filmed in 1957 and again in 2007. The hallmark throughout is brevity.
I spent more
than thirty years editing stories for radio, taking out the aural equivalent of
the stuff that people don’t read. My inner editor is always present when I
write, decluttering and removing the unecessary. I’ve tried to take Elmore
Leonard’s mantra to heart in my novel Astraphobia, part of BWL’s Paranormal
Canadiana Collection. The story
follows three generations of the McKenzie family as death by lightning stalks
them from Scotland to Ottawa to Moose Jaw.
The McKenzies grow and thrive over the years, from the birth of
Saskatchewan in 1905, through a world war, a decade-long depression, another
world war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the anarchic sixties and
seventies. But they are always looking
over their shoulders, wondering who will be the next victim of the McKenzie
Curse.
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Brevity can be hard to do. I find when I rough draft, it's mostly all dialogue. Then it's back to adding other things that make a story work. Looking forward to reading your paranormal.
ReplyDeleteI once read a book titled: WRITE TIGHT. It made a great impression on me. My novels are packed with story, action, adventure, and I pattern my dialogue lines on what I learned from watching movies. JD wrote about Angel Revenge: "this author packs a lot of story in very few words." I'm very proud of it. Thanks for sharing your process.
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