Elements Of A Plot

The Great Kapok Tree Studying the Story Elements

Students will enjoy studying the story elements of The Great Kapok Tree through these engaging activities, students create products to share their understanding of the characters, plots, and settings of the book.

SSC.

Writing Genre Fiction

Several years ago, after many years of writing nonfiction, I decided to write a novel-a medical thriller in the mold of Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, and Michael Palmer. The problem was that, although I knew how to write and had received a number of awards for nonfiction works, I didn't know the how to write fiction. So, before putting fingers to keyboard I did a thorough search of the literature, which included reading numerous books and hundreds of website articles. What I discovered was that there simply wasn't one good source from which to learn the craft of writing genre fiction. "Writing Genre Fiction: A Guide to the Craft" is the book I was looking for when I set out on my quest to learn how to write fiction. It is an attempt to share what I learned from my research. It covers the six key elements of genre fiction; the various genres and subgenres; a large number of genre-fiction writing techniques; plot, subplots, and parallel plots; structure; scene and sequel; characterization; dialogue; emotions; and body language. It also covers additional information about copyrighting and plagiarism, where to get ideas, manuscript formatting and revision, and query letters and synopses. In addition, an appendix covers a large number of grammar tips.