often a middle-aged man (sorry to be sexist, boys) - to want formats they can write to. It seems to me that these tend to go hand in hand with computer programming

I fit into both of those categories (i.e. middle-aged man and computer programmer), yet I've never believed in formulaic writing (or formulaic anything else, for that matter). I've also encountered a lot of women who want rules of thumb for everything (from how to drive onto a motorway safely to how to put together a story to how to raise a child).

The truth is, there are a lot of people who cling to formulae and rules of thumb as a substitute for engaging brain and thinking about what they are doing.

Alex

Talking of structure, but has anyone else noticed how many authors use repetition to bulk out their novels? I've recently read Terry Pratchett, Jim Butcher (Dresden Files) and Joseph Delaney (Spook's Apprentice), and they all have repetition in passages. With Butcher & Delaney, writing in the 1st person, often where their main characters are mulling stuff over and over, going over what they've learnt already and deciding what to do next. Pratchett just seems to like to write things in different ways and keeps the all the little darlings in, rather then choosing just the one line or paragraph of prose. I guess in Pratchett's case means that one line of carefully crafted prose doesn't stand out in the scene.
Anyway, just something to file away in my #whatIdiscoveredtoday file, to be brought out when I'm struggling to get up to 80K and I'll think, aha, I'll just repeat a few things.

The name of the website says it all "storyfix" - if writing books well was that easy everyone would do it. There are a lot of American sites/books/writers who have their version of Dr. Feelgood's Magic Elixir, which promises to solve just about every problem in x steps. Most contain grains of truth, however very few are very satisfactory. The best and most challenging I have found is "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell - which really is about myth and classical storytelling and is worth checking out.

Ben Yezir

There is a video interview of Terry Pratchett, on Amazon.co.uk, where he is talking about the making of Going Postal into a TV film. The very first thing he says is that he doesn't really plan any of his novels. He just starts with an idea, and builds it around that.

Alex

King says the same.
I suspect it's because they so intutively know how to build story. Like a cook who can just tell exactly when the cake is cooked through by a slight touvh of a fingertip.
HB x

Terry Pratchett was a journalist before he began writing novels, so maybe that's where he got the skills that enable him to construct a story on-the-fly. I imagine journalists generally don't have time to sit around constructing interesting ways of telling a news story. The translation of the article into something with a narrative hook at the beginning, a middle with subtance, and ending with a clever reference back to the beginning, probably has to be done semi-automatically as the article is being written.

Alex