Hatrack River Writers Workshop: New lessons in Uncle Orson's Writting Class

This is topic New lessons in Uncle Orson's Writting Class in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by GZ (Member # 1374) on :

Three new ones, and some updates to some of the older installments. One said something about another writting book in the works, about the issues of writing novels.

http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/index.shtml

Posted by tamalynn (Member # 1304) on :

Ah, finally. Thanks for the tip!

Posted by Jules (Member # 1658) on :

Hmmm... interesting. I liked 'Stories with soul', partly because I've just finished reading the same book (Michael Chrichton's "Prey") and the comments made in the question about it kind of resonated. It was a fun book, but lacked something.

[I've just read this through now I've written it and there aren't really any spoilers in it, not beyond what you'd get reading the back cover and prologue from the book, anyway]

My own analysis of it is slightly different though. I feel it lacks character development. The protagonist, at the end, is essentially the same character as at the start.

Also, I don't think starting the story with an excerpt from near the end was a good plan. There's a line in the prologue something like "Everyone else involved in this thing is dead already" - so there's not really an awful lot of 'will this character survive' suspense left. You know from page 1 who survives and who doesn't.

Also there were a number of factual inaccuracies in the book which were, I think, inexcusable. Some of them really jolted me out of the book into a 'but that's not right...' kind of mode. The first one was a tiny little thing, but it was in the first chapter - in describing the date on a video clip, Crichton says that international date format is 'year-day-month', which is just wrong (it's 'year-month-day'). It kind of surprised me because previous Crichton books I've read have always been very well researched.