Hollywood

How To Hook Your Audience

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This article is by Craig W. Van Sickle & Steven Long Mitchell.

the-pretenderWhile novels, graphic novels, television or motion picture scripts each present writers with different formats, narrative challenges and audience expectations, they all have one very simple commonality at their heart: telling a great story that hooks, pulls in and holds its consumer.

Simple, right? Well, as they say in novel writing circles, if writing were easy, everyone would be Stephen King.

Truth is, no matter what medium, defining and learning how to hook your audience can actually be very simple if we just break down the elements of storytelling into small, manageable segments.

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Writing the Military: 5 Biggest Mistakes

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kingdom-of-heaven
Kingdom of Heaven

This article is by Joseph Zieja.

I’m an officer in the United States Air Force, and I’ve been wearing the uniform for ten years.  I also write.

I’ve had pieces appear in Daily Science Fiction and some other anthologies across the web and in print.  So I have a tiny bit of writing clout to back up my military experience, and you can lean on that when I tell you that there are a lot of mistakes in the way that writers portray the military in their fiction.

I therefore present to you the Top 5 Biggest Military Mistakes in Fiction, According to Joe Zieja.  I’ll try my best to keep it­ to speculative fiction, since I know that’s who my audience is, but these mistakes extend to all genres.

One last warning:  I’m from New Jersey.  Hold on to your self-esteem.

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