Is your National Novel Writing Month plot stuck? Maybe you need to add in a little irony.
The TED-Ed team partnered with educator Christopher Warner to create videos about both verbal irony and dramatic irony (embedded above). Below, we’ve rounded up three tips on how to incorporate dramatic irony into a story.
1. In a post for the Publishing Crawl blog, young adult author Julie Eshbaugh encourages that writers “reveal a character’s true feelings by allowing them to speak their mind to someone they don’t recognize.”
2. A contributor at the StoryCrafters, Ink. blog advises that one “use flashbacks and flash forwards. By revealing something in the past or the future, you may show the audience something that the characters do not.”
3. In a comic called “The Three Most Common Uses of Irony,” the Oatmeal references a scene in William Shakespeare’s tragic play “Romeo & Juliet” where the Capulets fret over Juliet’s death when the readers know that she has taken a sleeping potion. By sharing that secret, the tension of the story becomes heightened.
This is our eleventh NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. To help GalleyCat readers take on the challenge of writing a draft for a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, we will be offering advice throughout the entire month.