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Larry Brooks of StoryFix was interviewed yesterday at Advanced Fiction Writing about his latest book, Story Engineering and the art of building the perfect story.

Randy Ingermanson talked with Larry about several concepts outlined in his book, a must-read for any writer looking to take their story to the next level.

Randy:  One of your concepts on Story Structure that was new to me was your idea of “pinch points.” What is a pinch point and why does a story need one?

Larry: It’s from the movies, and it works great in novels. The driving source of tension in a story is the presence, the pressure, of an antagonistic force. We meet or sense that force early, we experience it at Plot Point One, and then it’s up to the author as to how we experience or see this antagonist. But we must see it and feel it again, and more than once. Pinch points are, very simply, when the antagonist comes to center stage, in context to what it/they want to achieve and how it opposes and threatens the hero and her/his quest. In a story about cancer, the cancer would rear its ugly head at the pinch points in a way that reminds us what’s at stake, what’s at risk and what the hero must conquer. The optimal locations are the 3/8th and 5/8ths points in the story, at a minimum, but more can be better, too. Because those moments often occur frequently, we can easily miss them as pinch points. But that doesn’t change the power of them when they are inserted in the right place, even if they are in nearly every scene otherwise.

Read the whole interview here.

Harper Collins is not backing down from its cap on e-book lending to 26 per license, according to a post at MobyLives, which has been covering the story and how the publisher’s actions have angered librarians who are already dealing with budget cuts.

The publisher’s decision to limit library lending (even while some other publishers completely restrict eBook lending via libraries) has caused a backlash among some librarians and has even called for a boycott.

Yesterday HarperCollins issued an “open letter” to librarians saying that, well, it wasn’t going to back down. According to the statement,

“We spent many months examining the issues before making this change. We talked to agents and distributors, had discussions with librarians, and participated in the Library Journal e-book Summit and other conferences. Twenty-six circulations can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist. If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point. Our hope is to make the cost per circulation for e-books less than that of the corresponding physical book. In fact, the digital list price is generally 20% lower than the print version, and sold to distributors at a discount.

We invite libraries and library distributors to partner with us as we move forward with these new policies.”

Read the entire post at MobyLives.