Lawrence C. Connolly

Tag: novel writing

  • Thinking Like a Writer: Finding the Words

    For Mark Twain, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” For Mary Shelley, it is the difference between creature and being. We can see her deliberation in the excerpt (at left) of her Frankenstein manuscript, where she makes a choice that best…

  • Researching a Novel:
    Lost Worlds above the Clouds

    It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the distance, with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.  That’s George Edward Challenger describing the Amazonian plateau in Arthur…

  • Monster Wrangled!

    Mission accomplished . . . but of course I had expert help from the fourteen talented writers who attended the presentation. Together, we considered how to effectively present strange creatures in genre fiction. With a nod to Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige, the discussion explored how some of the most effective monster scenes in science…

  • “Dramatize it! Dramatize it!”

    In my previous post I promised to spend time responding to questions submitted during my most recent presentation on “The Art of Revision” at Seton Hill University. If you want to know more about the backstory, please take a look at that previous post, otherwise . . . read on! The next question in my stack…