Characters in a story, be it a short story, a novella or a novel, can’t exist if nothing else is happening. Characters need to go through situations in which they both act and react, move ahead and move back, learn, make mistakes, and grow. In other words, every novel needs a plot, needs something happening to its characters.
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Like a novel or a short story, a screenplay revolves around a theme and has elements such as characters, setting, plot, and dialogue. It also requires pacing and a presence of a conflict.
The format of a screenplay is very different from the format of other forms of creative writing. A screenplay would typically have three acts and between 100 and 120 pages of text. Screenplays under 100 pages and above 120 pages usually can’t be turned into plays or movies for economic reasons. Many movie goers would not come to see a short film because they think that it’s not worth going to a movie theater and spending money. Longer scripts can require giant budgets, making them unattractive to production studios.
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When most people think about a book for children, they think about picture books. The audience of picture books is children that go to nursery school and elementary school.
Picture books usually have somewhere between 150 and 1,000 words. In such books, it is the illustrations that have to attract interest and convey the meaning. It often happens that writers of picture books can’t create illustrations. Publishers of picture books will often match up illustrators with writers. Even if they can’t create illustrations, authors of picture books need to think about how their words will transform into drawing and how a compelling story consisting of words and pictures would look like.
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Novels have been capturing the imagination of readers and taking them into worlds of their own for centuries. There are a lot of novel genres, including romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thrillers and others. There are also subgenres such as historical romance that many people aren’t even aware of.
Today novels attract more writers than any other forms of creative writing. They all have elements that are key to every kind of novel. These elements are the following: theme, plot, setting, characters and dialogues between them. Different authors use these elements in different ways. Some prefer to pay a lot of attention to a theme and a setting. Others start with a character and develop a story by providing readers with insights into the character. While the elements can interact with each other in a countless number of ways, it is important for all of them to be present in a novel, be strong and work smoothly together with other elements.
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Many authors try writing short stories before venturing into other forms of creative writing. Short stories may seem easy to write, but in reality, writing short stories requires a lot of skill.
Short stories are different from short novels and other works. Most writers, editors, and publishers define short stories as works of fiction that are shorter than 5,000 words. The novella is a bit longer than a short story and its length is usually between 5000 and 40000 words.
The keyword to the format of a short story is the word “story.” The best stories are able to tell in not too many words a tale of feelings, thoughts, sights and action. A reader of a short story needs to be able to relate to a compelling moment of the story. What characters say and do needs to provide insight into their condition and at the same time help the readers understand themselves and the world around them.
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Some people feel offended when they hear the term “creative writing” because they think that the term diminishes other kinds of writing, such as non-fiction or technical. In reality, this term is very innocent. It came to life in American colleges as a way to differentiate a course on writing from other courses, such as English 101 or Technical Writing for Scientists. A need for a course in creative writing has emerged in part because other courses in composition had too much of cookie-cutter approaches mixed with political correctness, gentility, and exercises that were the same for everyone.
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