Welcome to my inaugural blog! 

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I'm launching a series of short posts about fiction writing to mark the launch of my coaching business at Porteous-StoryDoctor.com. I hope you find them interesting!

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The history of oral story telling is inextricably intertwined with the evolution of human society. While its origins are lost in the mists of time, it built cultural cohesion and helped pass knowledge and lore from one generation to the next. It gave rise to songs and poetry and, eventually, literature. You can still recognise it, hideously disfigured by the carnival mirror of technology, in the social media of today.

However, where story telling is somehow innate, fiction writing is artificial. Fiction writers can get so caught up in the fun of creating characters and stories that they forget the actual purpose of writing. 

Well, successful writing, anyway.

And that purpose is touching your readers.

Until you're a seasoned writer, you typically begin each new piece by telling a story to yourself, with the emphasis on Telling not Showing. Depending on your preferences, you'll probably focus on either the plot (what's happening) or the characters, to the detriment of the other. 

You'll blissfully ignore your eventual audience.

That means you lose sight of the fact that reading is foremost an emotional experience. Yes, it can be 'intellectual'; yes, there's 'literature'; but the majority of book-buying readers want to be emotionally transported.

So, the key to unlocking a successful writing career is to understand how your writing affects your reader's emotions and then to use that arcane knowledge to write stuff that grabs your reader by the scruff of the neck and drags them from one emotion to the next, leaving them gasping.

Now, if that sounds manipulative to you… you'd be right.

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Good writers are puppeteers, jingling their readers by the heartstrings.